On the other hand syllables are occasionally omitted, forming what is technically known as the compensating pause, although such departures from the norm are far rarer in lyric than in contemporary dramatic verse. An illustration of such a pause effecting emphasis is this, from Lyly:

Thy bread be frowns; thy drink be gall,

~) Such as when you Phao call.1

See also Spenser's Perigot and Willie's Roundelay," which is written altogether upon a recognition of the principle that the time intervals of successive or corresponding verses being the same, any distribution of syllables (not destructive of such time intervals), may be rhythmical, e.g.:

The while the shep-heards selfe did spill.

The greene

is for may - dens meet.

Here the normal scheme demands eight syllables, or four iambuses; but few verses of the answering refrain or burden exhibit this quantum, a deft distribution of pauses keeping the poem, however, perfectly rhythmical. An example of the compensating pause regularly distributed with onomatopoetic effect is found in Jonson's Echo's Lament for Narcissus, p. 113:

O could I still

Like melting snow upon some craggy hill

Drop, drop, drop, drop,

Since Nature's pride is now a withered daffodil.

Variety of feet entering into the organism of the stanza and not as a mere license for variety's sake is less frequent in Elizabethan lyrical stanzas than might be ex

pected. Some of Shakespeare's songs are the best known instances, as Silvia (p. 56), where the verses seem alternately trochaic and iambic by reason of the distribution of the unaccented syllables, the tripping refrains of the two songs from As You Like It (p. 95), and, best of all, the change from the anapæsts of the first four verses of the Dirge from Twelfth Night (p. 122) to the regular iambics of the fifth and seventh verses. While other lyrists, too, display this quality of an organic variation of foot, Thomas Campion appears to me one of the most subtle masters of this as of many other metrical devices. Space permits but two examples. Notice the clever adaptation of the metre to the thought in both cases, especially in the metrical change between the third and fourth verses of the latter:

What if a day, or a month, or a year

Crown thy delights with a thousand sweet contentings?
Cannot a chance of a night or an hour
Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings?
Fortune, Honor, Beauty, Youth

Are but blossoms dying;
Wanton Pleasure, doting Love
Are but shadows flying, etc.

Break now, my heart, and die! O no, she

may relent.

Let my despair prevail! O stay, hope is not spent.
Should she now fix one smile on thee, where were despair?
The loss is but easy, which smiles can repair.

A stranger would please thee, if she was as fair.1

Modes more usually employed to compass variety of cadence are found in the increasing freedom with which later Elizabethan lyrists used (1) the distribution of rimecorrespondences with correspondences as to length of verse, and (2) their growing skill in phrasing and the employment

1 Bullen's Campion, p. 95; and see p. 398.

of run-on lines.

Take this early stanza from A Handful

of Pleasant Delights (p. 25):

It is not all the silk in Cheap,

Nor all the golden treasure,

Nor twenty bushels on a heap,

Can do my lady pleasure.

Here the alternate lines correspond respectively in length, rime, and rhetorical pause (i.e., 'sense pause'), and unite, with perfect regularity of stress and number of syllables, to carry out what may be termed the metrical scheme. contrast, consider this stanza of Jonson :

Mark, mark, but when his wing he takes

How fair a flight he makes!

How upward and direct!

In

Whilst pleased Apollo

Smiles in his sphere to see the rest affect

5

In vain to follow.

This swan is only his,

And Phoebus' love cause of his blackness is.1

Here only two of the lines, which correspond in length, also correspond in rime; whilst not only are the verses of several different lengths, but the enjambement, or 'overflow' of lines 1, 4, and 5 adds a still greater variety to the effect. These characteristics were so general and often so dependent upon a passing mood that they hardly call for individual specification. Greene and Lodge (but neither Breton nor Lyly) often show extreme diversity in the lengths of their verses.2 Among later lyrists the same contrast is to be found in the verse of Davison and Drummond on the one hand and

1 Ode ȧnуopiкý, Jonson, Riverside ed., p. 374.

2 Cf. Rosalind's Madrigal, p. 29, Menaphon's Song, p. 35, or Doron's Jig, p. 38, with Apelles' Song, p. 19, Olden Love-Making, p. 27, or Phyllida and Corydon, p. 47.

Wither and Browne on the other.1

Shakespeare in his very latest lyrics, Jonson and Fletcher at times, and Donne constantly, show much freedom and art in phrasing and in the employment of the overflow.2

The Elizabethan lyric, like all English verse, displays an overwhelming preference for single or masculine rimes as compared with double or feminine ones. This is demanded by the monosyllabic character of our tongue and that proclitic tendency which has come to make the iambus the usual foot in modern English. Feminine rimes, however, are used not only to vary the effect by a redundant final syllable, as in:

3

but also as entering into the organism of the stanza, as in this Madrigal from Bateson's collection :

1 Cf. Madrigal, to Cupid, p. 72, Drummond's Madrigals, pp. 179, 206, with Welcome, welcome, p. 175, A Round, p. 176, or Shall I Wasting in Despair, p. 168.

2 See Shakespeare's Orpheus, p. 164, Fletcher's Bridal Song, p. 160, or Care-charming Sleep, p. 173, Jonson's Echo's Dirge, p. 113, Nymph's Passion, p. 192, or Dream, p. 193, Donne's Funeral, p. 104, and the Sonnet on Death, p. 142. This subject seems to me worthy of greater attention than it has yet received except in the field of dramatic blank verse. Few points of metre offer so strong an index of poetic temperament and development if wisely investigated.

3 As instances of this proclitic character, notice the obscure pronunciation of many common English words, e.g., the män, of steel. Other reasons for our modern preference for the iambus are to be found in the fact that monosyllabic words compounded with a prefix usually retain the Teutonic root-accent: forewarned, běcōme; that in words of three or more syllables the secondary accent is likely to fall on alternate syllables: extenuate; and that many rules of collocation further make for this tendency. * See p. 88 9-12.

Sister awake, close not your eyes

The day its light discloses

And the bright morning doth arise
Out of her bed of roses; 1

or this of John Fletcher:

Away, delights! go seek some other dwelling,
For I must die.

Farewell, false love! thy tongue is ever telling

Lie after lie.

Sidney, Breton, several of the madrigal writers, and others have written poems, the rimes of which are wholly feminine. E.g., Breton's A Farewell to Love:

Farewell, love and loving folly,

All thy thoughts are too unholy :
Beauty strikes thee full of blindness,

And then kills thee with unkindness, etc.2

In a long poem, however, this at times becomes forced. The greatest possible variety as to the number and arrangement of rime correspondences is to be found in this literature; men like Lodge, Nashe, and Shakespeare did not hesitate to play upon a rime for emphasis, serious or sportive, to the extent of four, six, and even eight successive lines. Notice the effect produced by the following, which is further increased by the strong and regular terminal and internal caesura :

Accurst be Love, and those that trust his trains !

1 P. 132.

He tastes the fruit whilst others toil,

He brings the lamp, we lend the oil,
He sows distress, we yield him soil,
He wageth war, we bide the foil.3

2 Bullen's Lyrics from Elizabethan Romances, p. 97.

3 P. 60; see also pp. 29, 51, and M. N. D., iii, 2, 102-109.