Anderskn. — 7Vte Verse-unit. 623 



the mid-pause misplaced ; a principal pause, in short, has been placed in 

 the position of a minor pause, and hence the confusion. As contrast, two 

 examples may be quoted : — 



(40.) (I. I see Thou mind'st him much, that dost reward him so : 

 Being but earth, to ruU^ the earth, whereon himself doth go. 



b. Razed to the ground is Eretria — but Athens, shall Athens sink, 

 Dro]) into dust and die — the flower of Hellas utterly die, 



A probable origin of such unbalanced Ballad verses is more fully discussed 

 in paragraph 4 of Section II. 



20. It was said in the last paragraph that the full Romance verse must 

 contain no more than eight stress-units. This is no arbitrary but a natural 

 law, implicitly obeyed by the poets. On the perception of the law poetry 

 emerged from the rhythmical to the metrical form, and since that emer- 

 gence the law has been obeyed — intuitively, it may be, but the more per- 

 fectly perhaps for that very reason. One may search the garden of British 

 poesie for violation of the law in vain, until the latest garden of Tennyson 

 is entered, when the failing hand of the gardener was no longer able to 

 check the growth of weeds : — 



(41.) Will my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ? 

 Must my days be dark by reason, ye Heavens, of your boundless nights. 

 Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites ? 



" Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state, 

 Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great, 

 Nor the myriad world. His shadow, nor the silent OiJener of the Gate." 



(" God and the Universe.") 



The thought is starlike in its splendour of bloom : was the flower calledja 

 weed ? At least, around the briar to which the rose has ranked lingers^a 

 sweetness intense as the subtlest odour of the rose ; and it must not be 

 forgotten that the rose was, in the first place, a foster-child of the briar. 

 But, shutting his eyes to the beauty of the thought, is not every reader con- 

 scious of a certain inharmony in the metre ? What is the cause of it ? — 

 of what does the thorn of the briar consist ? Approach the flower from 

 another side : — 



(41a.) Will my tiny spark of being vanish in your deeps and heights ? 



Must my days be dark by reason. Heavens, of your boundless nights. 

 Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, fiery clash of meteorites ? 



" Spirit, nearing yon dark portal, limit of thy human state, 



Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power, the one, the great, 



Nor the myriad world. His shadow, silent Opener of the Gate." 



Has not the sense of inharmony disappeared ? What, then, was its cause ? 

 In (ila) the verses are full Romance verses of eight units ; in (41), on the 

 other hand, each verse contains nine units, the first half of the verse four, 

 the second half five. The intruding ninth unit was the cause of the in- 

 harmony ; it was as though one, thinking to have reached the stair-foot, 

 had fomid another step. As Browning's verse in (35A) was an unbalanced 

 Ballad verse, so Tennyson's is an unbalanced Romance verse — a solitary 

 example. 



21. To summarize this section, the " verse-unit " of British lyric mea- 

 sures, which are all included in Romance metre and its three variants, is 

 a verse of eight stress-units or their equivalent ; as — 



