I am tempted to-day to go farther, and to maintain
that, the larger, the sublimer, your subject is, the more
impertinent rhyme becomes to it: and that this impertinence
increases in a sort of geometrical progression as you advance
from monosyllabic to dissyllabic and on to trisyllabic rhyme. Let
me put this by a series of examples.
We start with no rhyme at all:
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first born!
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity.
We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in "Hamlet" or
"Lear," that here is verse at once capable of the highest
sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting and
lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide and pause
of the caesura, to carry it on and on. We feel it to be adequate,
too, for quite plain straightforward narrative, as in this
passage from "Balder Dead":
But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose,
The throne, from which his eye surveys the world;
And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode
To Asgard.
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