To this, this Oake cast him to replie Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived. The night is chill; the forest bare; From the lovely lady's cheek- On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. In his Preface to this poem Coleridge said: "The metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle; namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." The verse is accurately described, but it has frequently been pointed out as curious that Coleridge should have spoken of it as "founded on a new principle," when the principle in question was that of native English verse from the earliest times.* For other specimens of verse showing irregularity in the number of syllables between the accents, see Part Two, under Non-syllable-counting Four-stress Verse. iii. Silent Time-intervals between Syllables (Pauses) (a) Pauses not filling the time of syllables. Most English verses of more than eight syllables are divided not only into the time-intervals between the accents, but also * Leigh Hunt said that "Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical professors the minstrels, and dividing it by time instead into two parts (which Schipper calls "rhythmical series ") by the Cesura. The Cesura is a pause not counted out of the regular time of the rhythm, but corresponding to the pauses between "phrases" in music, and nearly always coinciding with syntactical or rhetorical divisions of the sentence. The medial cesura is the typical pause of this kind, dividing the verse into two parts of approximately equal length. In much early English verse, and in French verse, this medial cesura is almost universal; in modern English verse (and in that of some earl y poets, notably Chaucer) there is great freedom in the placing of the cesura, and also in omitting it altogether. The importance of this matter in the history of English decasyllabic verse will appear in Part Two. In the early Elizabethan period the impression was still general that there should be a regular medial cesura. Spenser seems to have been the first to imitate the greater freedom of Chaucer in this regard. See the Latin dissertation on Spenser's verse of E. Legouis (Quomodo E. Spenserus, etc., Paris, 1896), and the summary of its results by Mr. J. B. Fletcher in Modern Language Notes for November, 1898. "Spenser," says Mr. Fletcher, "revived for 'heroic verse' the neglected variety in unity of his self-acknowledged master, Chaucer." In Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English (1575), we find: "There are also certayne pauses or restes in a verse whiche may be called Ceasures. . . . In mine opinion in a verse of eight sillables, the pause will stand best in the middest, in a verse of tenne it will be placed at the ende of the first foure sillables; in a verse of twelve, in the midst. . . . In Rithme royall, at the wryters discretion, and forceth not where the pause be untill the ende of the line." This greater liberty allowed the rime royal is doubtless due to the influence of Chaucer on that form. For Gascoigne's practice in printing his verse with medial cesura, even without regard to rhetorical divisions, see the specimen given below. it is of syllables." (See the entire passage on Christabel, in the Introduction, on "What is Poetry ?", to Imagination and Fancy. For a criticism of the metrical structure of Christabel, see Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody (ed. 1901, pp. 73-75). Another interesting Elizabethan account of the cesura is found in Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), where the writer compares the verse-pause to a stop made by a traveler at an inn for rest and refreshment. (Arber's Reprint, p. 88.) Specimen of French alexandrine, showing the regular medial cesura: Trois fois cinquante jours le général naufrage See further, on the character of the French alexandrine and its medial cesura, in Part Two, under Six-stress Verse. Specimen of early blank verse printed with regular medial cesura: O Knights, O Squires, O Gentle blouds yborne, (GASCOIGNE: The Steel Glass, 11. 439 ff. 1576.) For specimens of regular medial cesura, and of variable cesura, in modern verse, see under the Decasyllabic Couplet and Blank Verse, in Part Two. The Cesura is called masculine when it follows an accented syllable. (For examples, see previous specimen from Gascoigne.) It is called feminine when it follows an unaccented syllable. Two varieties of the feminine cesura are also distinguished: the Lyric, when the pause occurs inside a foot; e.g.: "This wicked traitor, whom I thus accuse; the Epic, when the pause occurs after an extra (hypermetrical) light syllable; e.g.: "To Canterbury with ful devout corage." "But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives." The "epic" cesura is quite as characteristic of dramatic blank verse as of epic. The pause occurring at the end of a line is equally regular with the medial pause, and corresponds in the same way to a phrasepause in music. It is an element of the same character, then, as the cesura, though not bearing the same name. It coincides less closely than the cesura with syntactical and rhetorical pauses. When there is no corresponding syntactical or rhetorical pause at the end of the line (in other words, when the metrical pause marking the end of the verse cannot be prominently represented in reading without interfering with the expression of the sense), the line is said to be "run-on.” Such an ending is also called enjambement. The importance of this distinction between "endstopped" and " run-on "lines will appear in the notes on the Decasyllabic Couplet and Blank Verse, in Part Two. (b) Pauses filling the time of syllables. A second class of silent time-intervals, or pauses, is to be distinguished from the cesural pause by the fact that in this case the |