the end, each couplet constituting a pretty distinct rhetorical unit, with internal balance nicely adjusted; as in the following example from Pope's Rape of the Lock:

But now secure the painted vessel glides,
The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides;
While melting music steals upon the sky,
And soften'd sounds along the waters die;
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.

In the romantic couplet there are many "runon" lines, the pauses occurring at any point, with frequently a full stop in the middle of a line. The opening lines of Keats's Endymion afford a good illustration:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

In either case these couplets are printed continuously, like blank verse, with large irregular paragraph divisions.

Stanza Forms.--Rhyme is not only a musical addition to verse, but it serves also to bind the lines into the larger poetic units known as stanzas. Sometimes stanzas are constructed without rhymes, as in Collins's ode To Evening, but this

is rare. The briefest stanza consists of two lines. Couplets, as defined above, are not stanzas. But when printed separately, they constitute stanzas to which perhaps the name of DISTICHS may be given. An example is Whittier's Maud Muller. Specimens may be found also of three-line stanzas, with triple rhyme. Above this we reach the forms of the more common stanzas, and the possible combinations become obviously very numerous. We shall indicate only the more frequent and characteristic combinations, some of which have distinctive names.

A QUATRAIN consists of four lines, usually with alternate rhyme, a, b, a, b:

I see the rainbow in the sky,
The dew upon the grass,
I see them, and I ask not why
They glimmer or they pass.

An important variation is that employed by Tennyson in In Memoriam, with an enclosed couplet, thus: a, b, b, a. The lines are tetrameter:

I sing to him that rests below,

And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave
And make them pipes whereon to blow.

Another variation is the oriental quatrain of

Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat: a, a, b, a. The lines of

this are pentameter:

Awake! for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that put the stars to flight:
And lo! the hunter of the east has caught
The sultan's turret in a noose of light.

RHYME-ROYAL is a seven-line pentameter stanza, a, b, a, b, b, c, c. It was much used in Chaucer's time. An example may be found in the familiar Prelude of William Morris's Earthly Paradise:

Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

OTTAVA RIMA is an eight-line pentameter stanza, a, b, a, b, a, b, c, c. The stanza and the name were borrowed from the Italian. Byron's Don Juan will furnish an example:

And first one universal shriek there rushed
Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder; and then all was hushed,
Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash
Of billows; but at intervals there gushed,

Accompanied with a convulsive splash,

A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony.

Another Italian form, not really stanzaic, is the terza rima, consisting of sets of triple rhymes interlocked, a, b, a, b, c, b, c, d, c, d, e, d, etc. See Shelley's Ode to the West Wind.

an

The SPENSERIAN STANZA, invented by Spenser for his Faerie Queene, consists of nine lineseight iambic pentameter and the ninth Alexandrine-rhyming a, b, a, b, b, c, b, c, c. The example following is from Spenser, but the stanza may be seen also in Byron's Childe Harold, Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, and various poems of Shelley's, such as the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples:

One day, nigh weary of the irksome way,
From her unhasty beast she did alight,
And on the grass her dainty limbs did lay
In secret shadow, far from all men's sight:
From her fair head her fillet she undight,
And laid her stole aside. Her angel's face,
As the great eye of heaven, shinéd bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place;
Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace.

The Sonnet. The sonnet is a complete poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines. In the strict Italian or Petrarchan form it is divided formally, and usually also logically, into an octave and a sestet. The octave contains but two rhymes, in the order a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a. The sestet may contain either two or three

rhymes arranged in any interlinked orderc, d, c, d, c, d; c, c, d, c, c, d; c, d, e, c, d, e; c, d, e, d, c, e, etc. The following example is from

Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.-Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

The Shaksperian sonnet is arranged in three quatrains and a couplet: a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e. f, e, f, g, g:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sun-set fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest:
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.