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The reign of the iambic couplet confined, but could not suppress, this native music; Pope notwithstanding, there came the "Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which, unsurpassed for beauty of thought and nobility of utterance in all the treasury of our lyrics, remains perhaps the most essentially English poem ever written.
"Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song" is four-stress iambic, rhyming ab ba.
We observe here the rare rhythm, analogous to the iambic scazon, of a trochaic tetrameter with a long penultimate syllable. From the Anthropopolis. "Non fit thesauris non auro pectu' solutum; Non demunt animis curas et religiones Persarum montes, non atria diviti' Crassi." The style here reminds us strongly of Horace. From the Bimarcus.
Before this are the lyrics, chiefly in the phalaecian eleven-syllabled verse which Catullus made so peculiarly his own, but in iambic, sapphic, choriambic, and other metres also, winding up with the fine epithalamium written for the marriage of his friends, Mallius and Vinia.
All the wanton extravagance which was elsewhere repressed by law or custom, here, under the protection of religion, burst forth with boundless license, and these scurrilous effusions were at length reduced by Archilochus into the systematic form of iambic metre.
As there are eight famous and chief languages; Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and French; so there are eight notable several kinds of poets, Heroic, Lyric, Tragic, Comic, Satiric, Iambic, Elegiac, and Pastoral. As HOMER and VIRGIL among the Greeks and Latins are the chief Heroic poets: so SPENSER and WARNER be our chief heroical "makers."
But as will, I think, appear later and conclusively the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried to manufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge's immortal stanza, or in text-books.
For he thinks that feet ought to be measured by their syllables, not by their quantity; and he does the same in regard to the trochee, which in its quantity and times is equivalent to an iambic; but which is a fault in an oration, if it be placed at the end, because a sentence ends better with a long syllable.
But in iambic verse, which models itself as far as possible on the spoken language, only those kinds of words are in place which are allowable also in an oration, i.e. the ordinary word, the metaphor, and the ornamental equivalent. Let this, then, suffice as an account of Tragedy, the art imitating by means of action on the stage.
The form is freer and more comprehensive than in Lessing's other pieces; it is very nearly that of a drama of Shakspeare. He has also returned here to the use of versification, which he had formerly rejected; not indeed of the Alexandrine, for the discarding of which from the serious drama we are in every respect indebted to him, but the rhymeless Iambic.
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