The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and even splendid. But there are others! It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read Coventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House" which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as the proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and Sleep," one of the most musical poems in our language. How strange at night the bay Of dogs, how wild the note Of cocks that scream for day, In homesteads far remote; How strange and wild to hear The old and crumbling tower, Amid the darkness, suddenly Take tongue and speak the hour! Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime, it is plain--as the form of poetry appeals to the ear--that the rime is a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each stanza. The real musical charm of the poem--only one stanza, of four, is given here--lies in the management of the rhythm. We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the common eight-syllable quatrain, says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law," a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity of movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable verse as acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being catalectic on at least one syllable, implying a final pause of corresponding duration. Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" is merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely accessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.