line of the stanza is rather in favour of the latter explanation, since we must otherwise assume anacrusis.

Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast thou

Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle cry.

Shot through the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew, And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

Trochaic, varied by the intermixture of dactyls, is found in Boadicea, which is mainly eight-foot trochaic, sometimes complete, but usually truncated, with one or more dactyls in the last three feet:

While about the | shore of | Mona || those Ne|ronian | legionaries. Girt by half the | tribes of | Britain, || near the colony | Camulo

dune A.

In the following we have four consecutive dactyls :

There the hive of | Roman | liars || worship a gluttonous | emperor idiot.

I think the rhythm would have been improved by omitting emperor, thus making a truncated eight-foot: but the final dactyl, giving eight complete feet, is also found in Hear it, gods! the | gods have | heard it, || O Icenian, | O Coritanian!

Tho' the Roman | eagle | shadow thee, || tho' the gathering | enemy | narrow thee,

*

Up my | Britons, | on my | chariot, || on my | chargers, trample them under us.

In one line we find three dactyls in the first half:
Bloodily, bloodily | fall the battle-axe, || unex|hausted, in exorable.
There is only one line in which the dactylic substitution
is not found in the last four feet:

There they dwelt and there they | rioted; || there, | there, they | dwell no more. A

Come from the hills where your hirsels are grazing,
Come from the glen of the buck and the roe;
Come to the crag where the beacon is blazing,
Come with the buckler, the lance, and the bow.
Trumpets are sounding,

War-steeds are bounding,

Stand to your arms and march in good order.

England shall many a day

Tell of the bloody fray,

When the blue bonnets came over the Border.

SCOTT.

Where shall the lover rest

Whom the fates sever,

From his true maiden's breast

Parted for ever?

Where, through groves deep and high

Sounds the far billow,

Where early violets die

Under the willow.

Weary way-wanderer, languid and sick at heart,

SCOTT.

Travelling painfully over the rugged road,

Wild-visaged wanderer! God help thee, wretched one.

SOUTHEY.

When, like the early rose,
Eileen Aroon !

Beauty in childhood blows,

Eileen Aroon !

When, like a diadem,

Buds blush around the stem,

Which is the fairest gem?—
Eileen Aroon.

Could I but live again

Twice my life over,

Would I once strive again?
Would not I cover

Quietly all of it—

Greed and ambitionSo from the pall of it,

Pass to fruition?

G. GRIFFIN.

BROWNING, Pisgah Sights.

CHAPTER VII.

MIXED AND DOUBTFUL METRES1.

WE have already had under consideration poems consisting of lines of varying length, whether this was caused by the use of truncation or anacrusis or feminine ending, where the number of feet remains unchanged, and there is no substitution of one foot for another; or by a difference in the number of feet, as in the Spenserian stanza, in which an Alexandrine comes at the end of eight heroic lines, or to a greater extent in such a poem as Milton's Hymn on the Nativity, which combines three-foot, four-foot, five-foot, and six-foot iambic lines. We have also seen examples of the interchange of feet: trochee, anapaest, and dactyl for iamb; iamb and dactyl for trochee, etc. In this chapter I deal with poems in which the metre is not simply altered numerically by embracing more or fewer feet, nor rendered momentarily ambiguous by the substitution of alien feet, but (1) where one portion is of distinctly different type from another; and (2) where the irregularity of stress is great enough to cause serious doubt as to the general character 1 These correspond to the asynartete measures of the Greeks.

of the metre.

Of (1) we have an example in the Fairy's

where Coleridge remarks on 'the delightful effect of the sweet transition to the trochaic metre' in the fifth line'.

1 The Quarto and Folio here have the cacophonous 'moon's,' for which Steevens suggested (1) the old-English 'moonès,' which is supported by 'whalès' in L. L. L.,

To show his teeth as white | as whallès bone,

and also in Spenser's F. Q. III. I. 15, and 'nightès' in Buckhurst's Induction, 9,

With night|ès starres, | thick pow|dred everywhere,

and in Surrey's sonnet, quoted by R. Morris (Hist. Eng. Gr. § 103), The night ès car | the stars | about | doth bring.

See other examples in Schipper, II. 78 f.

Steevens' second suggestion was 'moony,' for which he quotes 'moony sphere' from Sidney's Arcadia. In itself 'moones sphere' seems better to express the motion of the material sphere, which was supposed to carry the moon with it in its revolution: but if 'moony sphere' was used by Sidney, it may possibly have become a familiar phrase. Several of the Shakespearian editors prefer to keep the reading 'moon's,' justifying it by such lines as that from the witches' incantation in Macbeth:

Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweltered venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot;