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Many well-known poets Tennyson being perhaps the most familiar example have read aloud their own verses with a peculiar chanting sing-song which seemed to over-emphasize the fundamental rhythm. But who shall correct them? And who is entitled to say that a line like Swinburne's "Full-sailed, wide-winged, poised softly forever asway"
It is well to be a little neutral, perhaps, a little grey for the most part, so that upon occasion the more delicate hues may stand out clearly, while a rhythm may be employed to advantage which is in harmony with actual life, which is light and varied, and innocent of striving after solemnity. A modern poet, in my opinion, has illustrated this rhetoric of the minor key to perfection.
But you have not really got away from it; you are being unconsciously saturated, and after the festa is over you become aware that you are suffering from a surfeit of drum; the rhythm runs in your head and keeps you awake at night; when you go out of doors you expect to hear it in the distance; when you turn a corner you listen for it, and as it is not there you find yourself listening for it all the more anxiously.
And to Adam the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning, and resignation; its interchange of beseeching cries for help with outbursts of faith and praise, its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done; as, to those early Christians who had worshipped from their childhood upwards in catacombs, the torch-light and shadows must have seemed nearer the Divine presence than the heathenish daylight of the streets.
The hours of sleep are too much altered when they are filled by lights and crowds; and Nature is cheated so, and evaded, and her rhythm broken, as when the larks caged in populous streets make ineffectual springs and sing daybreak songs when the London gas is lighted. Nature is easily deceived; and the muse, like the lark, may be set all astray as to the hour.
When the anchor had been thrown it gave me a strange throb of pain to see the boats being lowered, and the sunshine gleaming on the rifles and helmets of the constabulary who crowded into them. Once on shore the men were formed in close marching order, a word was given, and the heavy rhythm of their boots came up over the rocks.
It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the young man's life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing together. And he sings as he passes the concierge's lodge, pitying the poor couple asleep what do they know of love?
Not yet had she caught her first glimpse of the pipers; but an instant later the tall figures came swinging proudly into sight, plaids swaying like tartan tassels, kilts moving with that wave-about-to-break rhythm given to their garments only by inspired pipers.
But for inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible which, if less fine than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to theirs no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain.
He was lost in a deep, dreamless sleep. It was nearly noon when the tired youth awoke. He looked wonderingly about, and there was a haunting fear in his light eyes, like those of a stag that dreads the hunters. From the north there came the sound of drum-fire, a weird, almost tedious, rhythm of guns working at a feverish pace; and the near-by road was a mass of jumbled traffic.
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