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couplet from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that which is to follow.
There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the
Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next.
In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for
Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer.
By the variety of his pauses—now at the close of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth —he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become languorous.
He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as,
But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
How does he find in cruel heart to hate
Her that him loved and ever most adored
As the God of my life?
Why hath he me abhorred?
or this,
Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!
B. II.
c. VIII. 3.
Joseph Warton objects to
Spenser's stanza, that its ‘constraint led him into many absurdities.’
Of these he instances three, of which I shall notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one
