He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, 'Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;' And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him. He started up; she blushed as one ashamed; Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed. He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled: Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands: True love is mute, and oft amazed stands. Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled; And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day). The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough. Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or 'gemells' as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:-- Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny, Nay, I'll affirm and swear, I am not I: Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive, Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave. And yet, methinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand, Nor seem so much appalled at my hand; For my misfortunes have inur'd thine eye (Long before this) to sights of misery. No, no, read on, 'tis I, the very same, All thou canst read, is but to read my shame. Be not dismay'd, nor let my name affright; The worst it can, is but t' offend thy sight; It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm, It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm. But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from one of his epistles:-- O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve For all this world, yet will I not believe But that she's fair and lovely and that she So to the period of the world will be; Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all, For that so many sundry mischiefs fall Upon her daily, and so many take Up arms against her, as it well might make Her to forsake her nature, and behind To leave no step for future time behind, As she had never been, for he that now Can do her most disgrace, him they allow The time's chief Champion--.