Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The fair Pharonnida recovers strength, Though sighs each accent interrupted, to Return this answer:--'Wilt, oh! wilt thou do Our infant love such injury--to leave It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive A comfortable smile to cherish it, When thou art gone? They're but dull joys that sit Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would Our rigid fortune only be content With absence; but a greater punishment Conspires against us--Danger must attend Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day Wherein your battles join, how will my fear With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast, My heart's exposed to every danger that Assails thy valour, and is wounded at Each stroke that lights on thee--which absent I, Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.' The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit--that is the separate couplet--as the completely dominant element in the measure, the 'heroic' measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:-- In every language now in Europe spoke By nations which the Roman Empire broke, The relish of the Muse consists in rime: One verse must meet another like a chime. Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace In choice of words fit for the ending place, Which leave impression in the mind as well As closing sounds of some delightful bell. Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college _Vacation Exercise_, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats's early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:-- Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, * * * * *