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Even in stately, rhymeless decasyllabics the march and music of the verse help a limping thought along like a sore-footed soldier striding to the band. But the prose-writer has none of these advantages. He is like an actor without properties. His thoughts do not go along with a flutter of flags and a blare of trombones. Nor do they glide upon castors.
He is all but constant to the heroic couplet the Spenserian introduction to The Birth of Flattery, the variously-grouped octosyllabic quatrains of Reflections, Sir Eustace Grey, The Hall of Justice, and Woman, with a few other deviations, being merely islets among a wide sea of rhymed decasyllabics constituting at least nineteen-twentieths of the poet's outpouring.
Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once at least a splendid anapæstic couplet, which catches the ear and clings to the memory for a lifetime "What voices are these on the clear night air? What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"
The verse is mainly octosyllabic, sometimes blank, but the rough accentual 'rime' is also used. Decasyllabics are rare. There is also some prose in the comic part sustained by Autolicus and Conto and the aged clown Jarbus, as well as a certain amount of Spenserian archaism, and a good deal of dialect.
I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague resentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of its parts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have felt this. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfield better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics which I preferred to any other verse.
I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague resentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of its parts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have felt this. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfield better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics which I preferred to any other verse.
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