bmitting itself
to stricter law. I will enlarge upon this point presently.

F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not only
its instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darker
meaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor:
'play a set'--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage
'silence' for silent one) sometimes by description instead of direct
epithet ('coffined' for dead) but always indicative of there being more
in the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full though
his saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fulness depends the
majesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity of
contained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily loving
and true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, but
with truth, nor beautifully, but by love.

These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and verse
alike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymed
verse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music,
that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction or
architecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of time
and harmony.

When Byron says 'rhyme is of the rude,'[191] he means that Burns needs
it,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in this
need of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thus
the loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best of
Dante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney.

I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern scholarship;
(nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first edge of its
waves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of the shore
refuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than the
confused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's
_Anglo-Saxons_. I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece of
work, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragments
known of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing;
but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given in
King Canute's impromptu

'Gaily (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter)
sang the monks of Ely,
As Knut the king came sailing by;'

much to be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their
Sund