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alliteration. It is only as Horatio descends to earth again, that we have the double ending in l. 124

Have heaven and earth | together demonstrat (ed.

In Hamlet's speech to his mother he appears as a stern preacher, obeying the command received from his murdered father. Plainly there is no place here for ease and politeness. The same may be said of the Ghost's speech, only that it has an added solemnity. The old play is necessarily regular and formal. Soliloquies, if quietly meditative, or the outpouring of a pleasing emotion, will naturally take the regular poetic form if agitated or vehemently argumentative, they will be irregular, marked by the use of sudden pauses, feminine ending and trisyllabic feet, as we see in I. 2. 129—160 'O that this too too solid flesh would melt,' &c. This is remarkably shown in the speech beginning 'To be or not to be' (III. 1. 56), where we find five double endings in the first 8 lines, these being perplexed and argumentative; but none in the next 20 lines, as these are merely the pathetic expression of a single current of thought:

Who would far dels bear,

To grunt and sweat | under | a weary life,

I O

But that the dread | of something after death,

And makes us rather bear | those ills | we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Then in 1. 83 follow reflections of a more prosaic turn, and we again have two double endings. It may be noticed that in the soliloquies 111. 3. 36—96, six of the

twelve double endings consist of the word heaven or prayers, which are hardly to be distinguished from monosyllables. One other instance may be quoted to illustrate Shakespeare's use of the feminine ending. In 1. 1. 165 Horatio says

So have ❘ I heard, | and do | in part believe it.
But, look, the morn, | in rus set mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon | high east ward hill.

The first line is conversational, the two others imaginative without passion, only with a joyful welcome of the calm, bright, healthy dawn after the troubled, spectral night; and we have a corresponding change in the rhythm.

Another peculiarity of Shakespeare's later plays, which has much the same effect as the feminine ending, is what is called enjambement (for which Mr Austin Dobson, followed by Mr Gosse, suggests 'overflow' as an English equivalent), where the omission of the usual final pause allows the meaning of one line to run on into another. Such a line is called an 'unstopt line.' The proportion of unstopt to end-stopt lines is said to be about 1 to 18 in Love's Labour's Lost, which belongs to Shakespeare's earliest period, and 1 to 2 in the late Winter's Tale. Compare Act III. Sc. 2 of the latter:

Prythee, bring me

To the dead bodies of my queen and son :

One grave shall be for both; upon them shall1
-The causes of their death appear, unto1

-Our shame perpetual.

The license is carried even further by Shelley, who sometimes makes no pause between the end of one stanza and

1 These weak endings, in which term I include what are sometimes called 'light endings,' add to the difficulty of making any pause at the end of a line.

the beginning of another. This may have a fine effect, as in the end of the 18th stanza of the Ode to Liberty: The solemn harmony

(St. XIX.)

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn.

At other times it is probably meant to be comic, or at least to give an exaggerated air of freedom, as in the 40th stanza of the Hymn to Mercury:

Phoebus the lovely mountain goddess knew,
Nor less her subtle, swindling baby, who

(St. XLI.)

Lay swathed in his sly wiles. Round every crook
Of the ample cavern, for his kine Apollo

Looked sharp; and when he saw them not, he took
The glittering key, and opened three great hollow
Recesses in the rock.

This license is carried to still greater lengths by Milton in the lines:

Ophion with Eurynomè, the wide

encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule
Of high Olympus

and by Ben Jonson in Sejanus, II. 2:

Pray Augusta then

P. L. X. 580.

That for her own, great Caesar's, and the pub-
lic safety, she be pleased to urge these dangers.

It is used with comic effect in the Anti-Jacobin:

Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu,

That kings and priests are plotting in :
Here doomed to starve on water gru-

el, never shall I see the U

niversity of Gottingen,

niversity of Gottingen.

CANNING.

The chief use, however, of enjambement is undoubtedly

to render possible the elaboration of such a full harmony

Of flutes and soft | recorders; such | as raised

Deliberate val our breathed, | firm and | unmoved

With dread of death to flight | or foul | retreat ;

Nor wanting power | to mitigate | and 'suage

With solemn touch es troubled thoughts, | and chase

Anguish | and doubt | and fear | and sorrow and pain

But the use of the unstopped line, or, speaking more generally, the position of the pauses, goes only a little way to explain how the marvellous effect of these lines is produced. We must take into account other factors, of

1 Long vowels are here marked by thick type, alliteration by italics. 2 The variety of pauses is exhibited in the following scheme, where a stands for an accented, x for an unaccented syllable, and each pause is represented by a comma.

('In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood,' &c.)

xax, a x, x x A x x a

x a

,

"
xa xa

a a x x a

which we have not yet spoken, such as the quality of vowels and of consonants, the recurrence of sound in alliteration, assonance, rhyme or refrain, and generally the imitation of the sense by the sound, over and above the modes of variation enumerated in the previous chapters, if we would learn to estimate the technical skill of the poet.

Of rhyme and refrain I shall speak in a following chapter. Alliteration' is the technical term for the recurrence of a consonant or vowel-sound (the latter is also sometimes termed 'assonance'). As a rule, recurrence of sound is, within certain limits, pleasing to the ear; and where particular sounds affect us in a particular way, the multiplication of such sounds intensifies the effect. Thus the consonants are loosely divided into sharp and flat mutes, viz. dentals (t, d), labials (p, b), gutturals (k, hard c and g), liquids (1, m, n, r), and the spirants, semi-vowels and sibilants (f, th, y, w, s, sh, z, zh, soft g), all affecting us in different ways. The effort

to produce a particular sound is greater the earlier the check is applied to the breath, greatest at the throat (gutturals), becoming gradually easier with the dentals, and the labials, and easiest of all with liquids and spirants. Hence the liquids, with the exception of a strongly rolled r, the spirants, and the semi-vowels have the smoothest effect, and the gutturals the harshest, labials and dentals being intermediate. Sharp mutes are clearer and shorter than the flat. Then there is the rough breathing (h) which needs more of an effort than the simple vowel. There are also combinations of consonants mostly produced by the addition of liquids, or the prefixing of s to other consonants. Of vowels ah is 1 See for a fuller account Schipper, Engl. Metrik, 11. pp. 69 foll.