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'The Emperor's face with its green leaf-band Shall rest on my heart that loved him so. Give me the sprig in my dead hand, My uniform and sabre around me. Amen. 'So prays Grenadier Jacques. 'The old soldier had sacrificed the smooth metre; but I understood what he meant. 'The storm increased, and I spent the night at the Agency, lying on the bed of boughs, covered with a blanket.
Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another's mould.
Conflict and Compromise And everywhere in the arrangement of syllables into the patterns of rhythm and metre we find conflict and compromise, the surrender of some values of sound or sense for the sake of a greater unity.
Hereupon Cebes, interrupting him, said: "By Jupiter, Socrates, you have done well in reminding me. With respect to the poems which you made, by putting into metre those Fables of Æsop and the hymn to Apollo, several other persons asked me, and especially Evenus recently, with what design you made them after you came here, whereas before, you had never made any.
"Through the whole length of it:" and if "What is the circumstance which gives them a pleasing effect?" "The same as in poetical compositions, whose metre is regulated by art, though the ear alone, without the assistance of art, can determine it's limits by the natural powers of sensation." Enough, therefore, has been said concerning the nature and properties of number.
Without study of his forms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail to appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or a poet's design; but to note down the number of special words and cast up the sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty times in the structure of a single poem will help us exactly as much as a naked catalogue of the colours employed in a particular picture.
By far the ablest argument based upon a wider ground of reason or of likelihood than this of mere metre that has yet been advanced in support of the theory which would attribute a part of this play to some weaker hand than Shakespeare's is due to the study of a critic whose name already by right of inheritance the most illustrious name of his age and ours is now for ever attached to that of Shakespeare himself by right of the highest service ever done and the noblest duty ever paid to his memory.
But even this assumption, on a closer examination, appears extremely questionable. The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that it may move with a becoming liberty, within its proper precincts, as has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its strength will evaporate in boundless vacuity.
The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark "that metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the following words. In the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion." But is this a poet, of whom a poet is speaking?
But I did it that evening: I remember how the cool river-air blew in the window-curtain, and I held it back, looking steadily in at the thick-set, middle-aged figure of the man sitting there, in the lamp-light, dressed in rough gray: peering at the leather-colored skin, the nervous features of the square face, at the scanty fringe of iron-gray whisker, and the curly wig which he had bought after we were married, thinking to please me, at the brown eyes, with the gentle reticent look in them belonging to a man or beast who is thorough "game"; taking the whole countenance as the metre of the man; going sharply over the salient points of our life together, measuring myself by him, as if to know what? to know what it would cost me to lose him.
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