1919.] New Zealand Institute Science Congress. 335 
The following, too, will be familiar :— 
On either side the river lie 
Long fields of barley and of rye, 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky ; 
And thro’ the field the road runs by 
To many-tower’d Camelot; 
And up and down the people go. 
Gazing where the lilies blow 
Round an island there below. 
The island of Shalott. 
The kinship of the doubling, trebling, and quadrupling is well shown in a 
short poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “ The Bridal Ballad,” where they appear 
coupled with the common Ballad verse from which they spring. 
It is to be supposed that, as there is often extension of the verses by 
multiplication of parts, so there may also be reduction or curtailment. It 
is, of course, .possible that both extension and reduction were caused not 
by any wish to accommodate the thought, but for the sake of variation ; 
the thought accommodating itself to the lengthened or shortened verse. 
Whatever the cause, the verse is there. The Ballad verse is itself a 
curtailment of the Romance, the Alexandrine of the Ballad. In the 
following the Ballad verse has lost a second unit in the second half :— 
Pleasure ! why thus desert the heart 
In its spring tide ? 
I could have seen her, I could part, 
And but have sigh’d ! 
O’er every youthful charm to stray 
To gaze, to touch,— 
Pleasure ! why take so much away. 
Or give so much ? 
The curtailing will be more familiar in Keats’s stanza :— 
I set her on my pacing steed. 
And nothing else saw all day long ; 
For sideways would she lean, and sing 
A faery song. 
She found me roots of relish sweet, 
And honey wild, and manna dew, 
And sure in language strange she said 
I love thee true. 
As in the familiar stanza by Moore, the curtailed line may find another 
reading, the same that is given in Shakespeare’s song :— 
Come unto the yellow sands 
And then take hands, 
Curtsied when you have and kist 
The wild waves whist. 
but this is not the rhythm of Keats’s stanza and others like it. 
A shortening in a line following a trebled line is of interest:— 
Sweet Sussex owl, so trimly dight 
With feathers, like a lady bright, 
Thou sing’st alone, sitting by night, 
Te whit, te wlioo ! 
Thy note that forth so freely rolls, 
With shrill command the mouse controls, 
And sings a dirge for dying souls, 
Te whit, te whoo ! 
