except interspersed in the heroic line, the only long poems known to me in this metre being Drayton's Polyolbion and Browning's Fifine at the Fair. It has usually a break after the sixth syllable, as in Drayton's On which the mirth ful quire ||, with their | clear open throats, J I I Unto the joyful morn || so strain | their war bling notes That hills and valleys ring ||, and even the echoing air Seems all | composed | of sounds || about | them every where. But this rule is frequently broken in Spenser, Milton, and later poets, as But pined away | in anguish and | self-willed | annoy. F. Q. 1. 6. 17. No strength of man | or fiercest wild | beast could | destroy. Samson, 127. The Alexandrine occurs regularly as the ninth and last line in the Spenserian stanza, of which the pre unaccented syllables, it might seem that we ought to double the mark; thus the verses AA Few and short | were the prayers | we said, And we spoke | not a word | of sor(row would be described as anap.=. and 3+. Dawn on our | darkness and | lend us thine | aid ^ ^ would be described as dact. 4=. But the substitution of iamb for anapaest, and trochee for dactyl, is so constant, that it is unnecessary to mark their occurrence. I shall therefore reserve these symbols, in trisyllabic verse, for cases in which the foot is represented by a monosyllable. Verses with hypermetrical syllables may be conveniently divided into prae-hypermetrical and post-hypermetrical, according as the extra syllable comes at the beginning or end; but as the latter are generally known as feminine lines, I shall use hypermetrical in a special sense, of a verse which has the extra syllable at the beginning. ceding eight lines are five-foot iambic, as in the Faery Queen: The joyous birds | shrouded | in cheerful shade I O Their notes unto | the voice | attempered sweet: The silver-sounding instruments | did meet With the base murmur of the water's fall; The water's fall | with difference | discreet, Now soft now loud, | unto | the winds | did call, The gentle warbling wind || low answereth | to all. I It is also often used by Dryden and Pope to close a paragraph, sometimes as a third rhyming line: compare Pope, A need less Alexandrine ends the song, drags its slow length along. Not so, when swift | Camilla scours | the plain, I .I Flies o'er the unbending corn || and skims | along | the main The day was named, | the next | that should be fair; All to the general rendezvous | repair; They try their fluttering wings, || and trust | themselves | in air. The hounds at nearer distance hoarsely bayed, The hunter close | pursued | the visionary maid; She rent the heaven | with loud | laments, | implo-ring aid. The Alexandrine is seldom used by Shakespeare : where it is used, it is sometimes meant to have a stilted and bombastic effect, and sometimes marks a maxim or quotation the latter in Merry Wives 1. 2 Love, like a shadow, flies, when substance love pursues and in Merchant of Venice Who chooseth me | shall gain || what_many_men | desire the former in Nathaniel's verses (Love's Labour's Lost) If love make me | forsworn | how shall I swear to love? Thy eye Jove's lightning bears, || thy voice | his dread ful thun (der Which, not to anger bent, || is music and | sweet fire and Pistol in Henry IV., Part II., Act 11. 4 Untwine the sisters three! || come, Atropos, | I say. The seven-foot iambic is the metre of Chapman's Homer: Achilles' baneful wrath | resound, | O goddess, that imposed Infinite sorrows on | the Greeks, | and many brave | souls loosed From breasts heroic, sent them far | to that | invisible cave That no light comforts, and their limbs | to dogs | and vultures There is usually a pause after the end of the 4th foot; and if the line is there cut in two, it becomes the common metre' of the hymn-book, as God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. This seven-foot is sometimes alternated with the six foot, as in Surrey's Faithful Lover : For those that care | do know, and tasted have of troub(le, When passed is their wolful pain, each joy | shall seem them doub(le. Iambic lines containing more than seven feet are extremely rare. We will therefore return to the heroic line from which we started, and proceed downwards to the Four-foot Iambic, of which we may take Raleigh's answer to Marlowe as an example, If all the world | and love | were young, This metre is very common in Scott, Byron, Coleridge and Shelley. The ordinary modes of varying the rhythm, by change of pause and accentuation and by the use of trisyllabic feet, are employed by Scott in such lines as Swells the high trump | that wakes | the dead. Other writers make frequent use of initial truncation1, giving the effect of trochaic metre, as Marlowe, in the 4th of the following lines: Come live with me and be | my love, 1 See above, p. 22. And Shakespeare in A From the east to western Ind No jewel is like Rosalind. I I O O In Milton's L'Allegro and Penseroso this variation is so frequent that it is hardly possible to say whether the predominant rhythm is trochaic or iambic, as in the following lines: Come, pensive nun, | devout | and pure, So in Shelley's Ariel to Miranda the first eighteen lines are almost all complete iambics, but the next twelve suffer initial truncation, and might with equal justice be described as trochaic with final truncation. See below on four-foot trochaic. The reason why initial truncation is more frequent in the four-foot iambic than in the heroic line, is that the former is capable of far more variation in other ways, while the latter, which Touchstone describes as 'the right butter-woman's rank to market,' needs stronger measures to prevent its becoming monotonous. We shall see that the same is the case with the four-foot anapaestic. Milton's Hymn on the Nativity is made up of iambic) lines of varying lengths, with occasional truncation, thus: The oracles are dumb, |