me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo,

or these of Lucretius:

Jauaque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
Crebrius incassum magnum cecidisse laborem.

What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the
stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is
noble, and wears the toga?

As a substitute for the inimitable interpenetration of the words in
the Horatian strophe, we might have the external links of rhyme;
and it seems, in fact, to be a justification of rhyme, that besides
contributing something to melody and to the distribution of parts, it
gives an artificial relationship to the phrases between which it
obtains, which, but for it, would run away from one another in a
rapid and irrevocable flux. In such a form as the sonnet, for
instance, we have, by dint of assonance, a real unity forced upon
the thought; for a sonnet in which the thought is not distributed
appropriately to the structure of the verse, has no excuse for being
a sonnet. By virtue of this interrelation of parts, the sonnet, the
_non plus ultra_ of rhyme, is the most classic of modern poetical
forms: much more classic in spirit than blank verse, which lacks
almost entirely the power of synthesizing the phrase, and making
the unexpected seem the inevitable.

This beauty given to the ancients by the syntax of their language,
the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes. It
is a bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total absence of form,
favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat
juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making
a gem of every prose sentence, -- the art which, carried, perhaps, to,
a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of
Tacitus a series of cameos, -- that art is inapplicable to our looser
medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our
poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level;
the same effort will not, with this instrument, attain the same
beauty. If equal beauty is ever attained, it comes from the wealth of
suggestion, or the refinement of sentiment. The art of words
remains hopelessly inferior. And what best proves this, is that
when, as in our time, a reawakening of the love of beauty has
prompted a refinement of our poetical language, we pass so soon
into extravagance, obscurity, and affect