t feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to
Damascus has not really the time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not
your own rapture interrupted by some wonder 'How will he bring it
off'? And when he has searched and contrived to `ask us,' are we
responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not--if I may employ an
Oriental trope for once--let in the chill breath of cleverness
upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic
at the same moment[1].

As for triple rhymes--rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o'
news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse,
or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of
Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, hymn-book too--they are for
the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can
remove them, from any "Paradise Lost" or "Regained."

It may sound a genuine note, now and then:

Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh, it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none!

But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric.

III

So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the question of metre,
helped or unhelped by rhyme, in another way; and a way yet more
practical.

When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) was casting about
for his subject, he had a mind for some while to attempt the
story of "Job." You may find evidence for this in a MS preserved
here in Trinity College Library.

You will find printed evidence in a passage of his "Reason of
Church Government":

'Time serves not now,' he writes, 'and perhaps I might seem too
profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in
the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to
herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether
that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other
two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a
brief model ...'

Again, we know "Job" to have been one of the three stories
meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical dramas, the
other two being the madness of Tasso and "Prometheus Unbound."
Shelley never abandoned this idea of a lyrical drama on Job; and
if Milton abandoned the idea of an epic, there are passages in
"Paradise Lost" as there are passages in "Prometheus Unbound"
that might well have been written for this other story. Take the
lines

Why am I mock'd with death, and lengthen'd out
To deathl