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Such unmeasured feelings could not be held within the controlled harmonies of the hexameter nor within sapphic or alcaic or Pindaric strophes. These antique forms of poetry definitely expressed their contents, although sometimes suggesting further unspoken feeling, which is so noticeable with Virgil.
Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them.
For Fabre was born a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote, without ever finally attaining it"; the Parabola, "which seeks fruitlessly in the infinite for its second, lost centre: it is the trajectory of the bomb: it is the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun, then flee into the depths whence they never return."
With Edmund Cook down on the ballast in irons, and William Cook talking of salvation in the galley, and old John Watling expounding the Gospel in the cabin, the galleon, "the Most Holy Trinity" must have seemed a foretaste of the New Jerusalem. The fiddler ceased such "prophane strophes" as "Abel Brown," "The Red-haired Man's Wife," and "Valentinian." He tuned his devout strings to songs of Zion.
He had been debating in his own mind whether he should adopt the Dante rhyme for his ode to the young Madonna, or make it in strophes. He inclined to the latter treatment as more picturesque, and therefore more suitable to the subject.
He came, was seen, and conquered! But not at once; ah, no; for this charming royal idyll had its changing strophes, marking deepening degrees of sentiment admiration, interest, hope, assurance, joyous certainty. The Queen had resolved to receive both the Princes with cousinly affection and royal honors, but as though they had come on an ordinary visit.
Primitive man lived in a world constantly under the control of either friendly or hostile spirits and the really massive result of this faith of his is registered in regions as remote as the capricious genders of French nouns and the majestic strophes of the Hebrew Psalms, for the genders are the shadowy survivals of a time when all things had their spirits, male or female, and the Psalms voice the faith for which thunder was the voice of God and the hail was stored in His armoury.
After the recitation of the poem, M. Laurentie said that it abounded in patriotic sentiments and fine appreciation, to say nothing of the charming style of the falling strophes, at intervals, in their sonorous and lyrical refrain. M. Villemain added his acclamation. "In truth," said he, "once more our Academy is indebted to Jasmin!"
See the Spedale degli Innocenti, where a score of little flowery white children grow, open-armed, out of their sky-blue medallions. Really, are they lilies, or children, or the embodied strophes of a psalter? you ask. I mix my metaphors like an Irishman, but you will see my meaning.
"What?" he returned, sternly, pausing at the foot of the steps. "Your your lovely Strophes!" she continued, timidly. The bard frowned. "All great men profess to scowl at flattery," thought Straws. "She will have but a poor opinion of me, if I do not appear an offended Hector!"
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