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. And the stars came out in heaven,
High over Asgard, to light home the King.
But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart;
And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came.
And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang
Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets,
And the Gods trembled on their golden beds--
Hearing the wrathful Father coming home--
For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came.
And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left
Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall:
And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.

Now of rhyme he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy,"
or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page
of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself
inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity;
or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in
itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But
languages differ vastly in their wealth of rhyme, and differ out
of any proportion to their wealth in words: English for instance
being infinitely richer than Italian in vocabulary, yet almost
ridiculously poorer in dissyllabic, or feminine rhymes. Speaking
generally, I should say that in proportion to its wonderful
vocabulary, English is poor even in single rhymes; that the words
'love,' 'truth,' 'God,' for example, have lists of possible
congeners so limited that the mind, hearing the word 'love,' runs
f