et reiteration. Rhyme was then a new
element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an
added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it
be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to
freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are
offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in
leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover
of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible
strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse.

The _terza rima_--already in use--Dante adopted as suitable to
continuous narrative. With his feeling and aesthetic want
rhymed verse harmonized, the triple repetition offering no obstacle,
Italian being copious in endings of like sound. His measure is iambic,
free iambic, and every line consists, not of ten syllables, but of
eleven, his native tongue having none other than feminine rhymes. And
this weakness is so inherent in Italian speech, that every line even
of the blank verse in all the twenty-two tragedies of Alfieri ends
femininely, that is, with an unaccented eleventh syllable. In all
Italian rhyme there is thus always a double rhyme, the final syllable,
moreover, invariably ending with a vowel. This, besides being too much
rhyme and too much vowel, is, in iambic lines, metrically a defect,
the eleventh syllable being a superfluous syllable.

In these two prominent features English verse is different from
Italian: it has feminine rhymes, but the larger part of its rhymes are
masculine; and it has fewer than Italian. This second characteristic,
the comparative fewness of rhymes, is likewise one of its sources of
strength: it denotes musical richness and not poverty, as at first
aspect it seems to do, the paucity of like-sounding syllables implying
variety in its sounds. It has all the vocalic syllables and
endings it needs for softness, and incloses them mostly in consonants
for condensation, vigor, and emphasis.

Primarily the translator has to consider the resources and
individualities of his own tongue. In the case of Dante the rhythmical
basis is the same in both languages; for the iambic measure is our
chief poetic vehicle, wrought to perfection by Shakespeare and Milton.
There only remains, then, rhyme and the division into stanzas. Can the
_terza rima_, as used by Dante, be called a stanza? The lines are not
separated into trios, but ru