orward to match it with 'dove' or 'above' or even with 'move':
and this gives it a sense of arrest, of listening, of check, of
waiting, which alike impedes the flow of Pope in imitating Homer,
and of Spenser in essaying a sublime and continuous story of his
own. It does well enough to carry Chaucer over any gap with a
'forsooth as I you say' or 'forsooth as I you tell': but it does
so at a total cost of the sublime. And this (I think) was really
at the back of Milton's mind when in the preface to "Paradise
Lost" he championed blank verse against 'the jingling sound of
like endings.'

But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of which Dante had
an inexhaustible store, we find the English poet almost a pauper;
so nearly a pauper that he has to achieve each new rhyme by a
trick--which tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and
the hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for sublimity,
keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the inherent fault of the
machine--I mean Myers's "St Paul"--a poem which, finely
conceived, pondered, worked and re-worked upon in edition after
edition, was from the first condemned (to my mind) by the
technical bar of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily
chose. I take one of its most deeply felt passages--that of
St Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for
instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous vision
related in the "Acts of the Apostles":

Let no man think that sudden in a minute
All is accomplished and the work is done;--
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun.

Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing!
Oh the days desolate and useless years!
Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing!
Stings of my shame and passion of my tears!

How have I seen in Araby Orion,
Seen without seeing, till he set again,
Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion,
Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain!

How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring
Lifted all night in irresponsive air,
Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring,
Blank with the utter agony of prayer!

'What,' ye will say, `and thou who at Damascus
Sawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice;
So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us,
Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice?'

You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine.
But do you no