the fifth and seventh lines of each
stanza. The real musical charm of the poem--only one stanza, of four,
is given here--lies in the management of the rhythm.

We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the
seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most
mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the
common eight-syllable quatrain,

says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law,"

a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and
continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on
account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity of
movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable verse as
acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being catalectic on at
least one syllable, implying a final pause of corresponding
duration.

Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" is
merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would
be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent
through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of
rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of
sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely
accessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of
academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the
slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real
success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical
poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire,
rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms.

The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and
even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
masks, etc., edited by A. H