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The poem is in the old English unrhymed, alliterative verse, and "marks the revival of the English mind and spirit." Explorer of Nineveh, b. at Paris, s. of a Ceylon civilian. After spending some years in the office of a London solicitor, he set out in search of employment in Ceylon, but passing through Western Asia, became interested in the work of excavating the remains of ancient cities.
We doubt the feeling of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the eighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry.
Obviously, one cannot deliver blank verse naturally; such, however, is the power of make-believe in the audience that if the dramatist and his company can engage the sympathy of the spectators, a fairy tale in rhymed lines, a tragedy in unrhymed verse, a melodrama with flatulent phrases, and a comedy seeking the most exact reproduction of modern life permissible may seem equally plausible, credible, natural.
Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two took a week, that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C'est le DERNIER pas qui coute.
The level regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker portions of Titus Andronicus and the First Part of King Henry the Sixth the opening scene, for example, of either play. With Andronicus it has also in common the quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as of massacre.
"Why can it not be Christmas every day," asked Keith suddenly. "Because Christmas then would be like any other day," the father replied, reaching for the first parcel which was always for Keith. One by one they were handed out. Each one was elaborately addressed and furnished with a rhymed or unrhymed tag that often hid a sting beneath its clownish exterior.
In the single tragedy, and in one of the two histories, we may say that rhyme fights hard for life, but is undeniably worsted; that is, they contain as to quantity a large proportion of rhymed verse, but as to quality the rhymed part bears no proportion whatever to the unrhymed.
One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and "dreaming woods" Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and the berries in his hair.
Philomela is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate will-worship of its unrhymed Pindaric: the Stanzas to the Memory of Edward Quillinan are really pathetic, though slightly irritating in their "sweet simplicity"; and if Thekla's Answer is nothing particular, The Neckan nothing but a weaker doublet of the Merman, A Dream is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier of the Marguerite group.
The sight of one whose fine qualities I had often heard of lately, was interesting enough; and, on the whole, proved not disappointing, though it was the translation of dream into fact, that is of poetry into prose, and showed its unrhymed side withal. A loose, careless-looking, thin figure, in careless dim costume, sat, in a lounging posture, carelessly and copiously talking.
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