_Lycidas_,
the _Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, the _Intimations_, and Emerson's
_Threnody_, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws
so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste. So
with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr. Coventry Patmore's
series. A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more
touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse
and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his
versification. And what movement of words has ever expressed flight,
distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a
celestial line--the eighth in the ode _To the Unknown Eros_? When
we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear
the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various
length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be
separated with something of a jerk. And this adding--as, for instance,
of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now
and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as _A Farewell_.
It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a
boat. In _The Angel in the House_, and other earlier poems, Mr.
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