or two feet, or forty feet-just so much as his thought needed-and thenceforward have let his thought measure every separate verse. But he did not do that; and hence the necessity of our going over the reasons why he should have done so. The poet or poets before him had never needed more space; and he, needing more, made the mistake of chopping up (to the eye) his longer sentence into two verses. He took one step instead of two. His one step was the measure of his independence of his power. He wrote in couplets. This was the birth of the stanza. He warped metre out of its adopted and legitimate meaning. We wish to show that his error has been gradually undoing, except to the eye. It is certainly fair to assume that all poetry is to be read or recited. A crucial test, therefore, of the nature of metre, and of the stanza, as we shall see by and by, is to be found in the recitation of any poem. Poetry to the eye is no more poetry than rhyme to the eye is rhyme. Is there an elocutionist or an actor in the world that would dare to read any one poem in our language, rhymed or blank, dividing it in his utterance according to the verses as they stand in any printed copy?—giving, that is to say, the same time to each line, and pausing the same time at the end of each verse, with no regard to the intermediate, grammatical punctuation? If so, he would be endured but once; or else at once be hissed, and deserve to be, from the stage, in any civilized community. And yet, what other use is there in this division into verses? Does Mr. Edwin Booth recite the pentameter blank verse of Shakespeare, say in Hamlet, with any regard to the pentametrical divisions? With not the slightest. His utterance of "To be, or not to be?" which is measured, differs in no respect, as to metre, from his "Alas, poor Yorick !" which is not measured. It may differ in rhythm, but not in metre; and it is metre that we are discussing. In both he follows the sense to which the punctuation has been made to conform; and all readers, closet as well as platform, of both verse and prose, must do the same thing. So, when we read, say, the Paradise Lost, aloud, we are guided by the grammatical punctuation-the paragraphs, the periods, the colons, the semi-colons, the commas, the interrogations, the exclamations, etc.-which should indicate the sense; and we pay no regard whatever to the ends of the verses nor to the capitals at the beginnings. Let us take some well-known passage as an illustration. This will do: "Say first, for Heaven hides nothing from thy view, The reciter and the reader would divide the passage somewhat thus: "Say first, for Heaven hides nothing from thy view, nor the deep tracks of hell; Say first, what cause moved our grand parents, in their happy state, favored of Heaven so highly, to fall off from their Creator, and transgress His will, for one restraint, lords of the world besides? Who first seduced them to that foul revolt? The infernal serpent; He it was, whose guile, stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived the mother of mankind, what time his pride had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host of rebel angels; by whose aid, aspiring to set himself in glory above his peers, he trusted to have equalled the Most High, if He opposed; and with ambitions aim against the throne and monarchy of God, raised impious war in Heaven, and battle proud with vain attempt." Pope's pentameters are made in pairs, and and can be read so with less variation than the productions of any poet since his day. And this is not evidence of his superiority as a verse-artist, but the reverse. His mind was apothegmatic, and his verse grew out of his mind naturally. It cannot be said that his punctuation is always good, or even generally so. It is, indeed, frequently very bad. We select a short passage from one of his most apothegmatic poems, giving what we conceive to be the proper, because natural, division into paragraphs. The reader can readily restore it to the original form: "Heroes are much the same, the point 's agreed, from Macedonia's madman to the Swede; The whole strange purpose of their lives, to find or make an enemy of all mankind! Not one looks backward, Onward still he goes, Yet ne'er looks forward farther than his nose. No less alike the politic and wise; All sly, slow things, with circumspective eyes; Men in their loose, unguarded hours they take, not that themselves are wise, but others weak. But grant that those can conquer, these can cheat; 'Tis phrase absurd to call a villain great: Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave, is but the more a fool, the more a knave. Who noble ends by noble means obtains, or, failing, smiles in exile or in chains, like good Aurelius let him reign, or bleed like Socrates, that man is great indeed." A passage from a later poet will show an increased disregard of the verse division, and tend to prove that the division into equal verses is in effect already only an ocular element in poetry. From Longfellow's Evangeline: “Indoors, warm by the wide-mouthed fireplace, idly the farmer sat in his elbow-chair, and watched how the flames and the smoke-wreaths struggle together like foes in a burning city. Behind him, nodding and mocking along the wall, |