perfectly coalesce,--the thought confining the emotion within decorous
limitations of law, the emotion beguiling the thought into somewhat of
its own fluent grace and rebellious animation. That is ill metre which
does not read itself in the mouth of a man thoroughly penetrated with
the meaning of what he reads; and only a man as thoroughly possessed
of the meaning of what he writes can produce any metre that is not
sing-song. Not that we would have Shakspeare's metre tinkered where it
seems defective, but that we would not have palpable gaps defended as
intentional by the utterly unsatisfactory assumption of pauses and
retardations. Mr. White has in many cases wisely and properly made
halting verses perfect in their limbs by easy transpositions, and we
think he is perfectly right in refusing to interpolate a syllable, but
wrong in assuming that we have Shakspeare's metre where we have no metre
at all. We are not speaking of seeming irregularities, of lines broken
up by rapid dialogue or cut short by the gulp of voiceless passion, nor
do we forget that Shakspeare wrote for the tongue and not the eye, but
we do not believe he ever left an unmusical period. Especially is this
true of passages where the lyrical sentiment predominates, and we beg
Mr. White to reconsider whether we owe the reading

"All overcanopied with luscious woodbine"
(instead of _lush_)

to the printers of the Folio or to Shakspeare. Even if we accept
Steevens's "whereon" instead of "where" in the first verse of this
exquisite piece of melody, and read (as Mr. White does not)

"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,"

it leaves the peculiar _lilt_ of the metre unchanged. The varied
accentuation of the verses is striking; and would any one convince
himself of the variety of which this measure is capable, let him try to
read this passage, and the speech of Prospero, beginning "Ye elves of
hills," to the same tune. In the verses,

"And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, | and do fly him
When he comes back,"

observe how the pauses are contrived to echo the sense and give the
effect of flux and reflux. Versification was understood in that day as
never since, and no treatise on English verse so good, in all respects,
as that of Campion (1602) has ever been written. Coleridge learned from
him how to write his "Catullian hendeca-syllables," and did not better
his instruction.[G]

[Footnote G: For th