very weak syllable. In reading, such a syllable is given the least accent possible-merely sufficient to indicate the time-beat:

The mockery of my people and their bane.

The sound of merriment and chorus bland.

Iambic pentameters, notwithstanding their five time-beats, show on the average only about four strong stresses to the line.

Often the unstressed position is occupied by a heavy syllable, which must not, however, be given the time-beat so long as there is an equally heavy syllable in the stressed position:

But how to take last leave of all I love.

3. The position of stresses may occasionally be shifted, yielding inverted feet:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Such inversion is most frequent at the beginning of a line or after a pause. It is mainly confined, too, to iambic verse, the other measures -trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic-having their accentual character more strongly marked.

Sometimes the shifting of stresses is carried so far as to bring about a kind of fusion of two feet into one long compound foot. The number and weight of stresses remain the same, but the alternation is temporarily lost:

And the first gray of morning filled the east.

Raised higher the faint head o'er which it hung. Here the scansion of the italicized portion is instead of

Rhyme.-Rhyme is a recurrence of the same sound or sounds. According to present English practice, two words are said to rhyme when they are similar in sound from the vowel of the last accented syllable to the close. It is commonly required that the consonants (or combination of consonants) preceding the accented vowel be different. That is, fate, ate, rate, gate, etc., may rhyme with grate, but not great with grate, because of their complete identity; but few poets have followed the French custom and allowed this identity. Spelling has nothing to do with the matter; strait and straight are both rhymes to either great or grate.

MASCULINE RHYME is rhyme of a single syllable: go-grow; felled - beheld.

FEMININE OR DOUBLE RHYME (so named because of the syllabic addition to feminine words

in French) is rhyme of two syllables; going growing; city - pity.

TRIPLE RHYME is also occasionally found: tenderly - slenderly; bring to her - spring to her.

Slight variations in the vowel sounds and (more rarely) in the consonant sounds are admitted by most poets: love - prove; Christ - mist; prize - Paradise.

WEAK or LIGHT RHYME occurs when one of the rhyming syllables has only a secondary wordaccent: see futurity; sped - piloted; spell - desirable.

Another musical device frequently employed is ALLITERATION. This is merely beginningrhyme, or similarity of sound at the beginning of words or syllables: now – never; blight – blossom; love – relent; strive – restrain. In early English poetry, alliteration was employed systematically, but now it is almost wholly incidental; for example:

With just enough of life to see

The last of suns go down on me.

To alliteration may be added ASSONANCE, or similarity of sound (chiefly vowel) within words; gray-save; gloaming – home. This also is but an incidental element. Yet these incidental elements often add great charm to verse. Observe, for example, how effectively the three

consonant sounds in the word Cupid are made to play through the following lines:

Cupid and my Campaspe play'd
At cards for kisses; Cupid paid

and observe how extremely musical the following stanza is made by the chiming and cadence of its dominant sounds:

The low downs lean to the sea; the stream,
One loose thin pulseless tremulous vein,
Rapid and vivid and dumb as a dream,

Works downward, sick of the sun and the rain. Blank Verse.-Blank verse is verse without rhyme. It is commonly iambic pentameter, as in Shakspere's dramas and Milton's Paradise Lost. In this verse there are no metrical units greater than the line; beyond that the verse simply moves in rhythmical masses and falls into paragraphs like those of prose:

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime." Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat

That we must change for Heaven? this mournful gloom For that celestial light?

Be it so, since He
Who now is sovran can dispose and bid

What shall be right; farthest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals.
Farewell, happy fields.

Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

Another familiar form of blank verse is the DACTYLIC HEXAMETER, which is modelled upon the Greek and Latin hexameter, with very

definite rules of its own.

Among these rules are sixth or last foot shall

the requirement that the always be a trochee; that a two-syllable foot (properly a spondee, but often a trochee) may be substituted for the dactyl of any foot but the fifth; and that the chief rhetorical pause within the line, technically known as the CAESURA, shall not come at the end of a foot:

Awed by her own rash words she was still: || and her eyes to the seaward^

Looked for an answer of wrath: far off, in the heart of the darkness,

Bright white mists rose slowly; beneath them the wandering ocean

Glimmered and glowed to the deepest abyss; and the knees of the maiden

Trembled and sank in her fear, as afar, like a dawn in the midnight,

Rose from their seaweed chamber the choir of the mystical sea-maids.

Couplets. The simplest use of rhyme is shown in the COUPLET-two successive rhyming lines. This, like blank verse, is most frequently iambic pentameter. Two kinds of pentameter couplets may be distinguished, the classic and the romantic. In the former there is a marked pause at