We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by _yo-heave-o_. Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres,--of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind. I think you will also find a charm heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these cadences, and be at once set on searching for the words that can rightly fill these vacant beats. Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things in pairs and alternatives; and, in higher degrees, we know the instant power of music upon our temperaments to change our mood, and give us its own: and human passion, seizing these constitutional tunes, aims to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music to thought, believing, as we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, and that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme exists, though the odds are immense against our finding it, and only genius can rightly say the banns. Another form of rhyme is iterations of phrase, as the record of the death of Sisera:-- "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead." The fact is made conspicuous, nay, colossal, by this simple rhetoric. "They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end." Milton delights in these iterations:-- "Though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues." "Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night? I did not err, there does a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night." _Comus._ "A little onward lend thy guiding hand, To these dark steps a little farther on." _Samson._ So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully used, and deriving some novelty or better sense in each of many verses:-- "Busk thee, busk thee, my bonny bonny bride, Busk thee, busk thee, my winsome marrow." HAMILTON.