Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the _enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:-- "Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood Were poured upon the pile of burning wood, And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food. Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound: 'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain, Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:" and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:-- "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil; I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not sententious, but fanciful and discursive:-- "Some in the fields of purest æther play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot across the night, Or seek the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain."