We feel of this, as we feel of a great passage in "Hamlet" or "Lear," that here is verse at once capable of the highest sublimity and capable of sustaining its theme, of lifting and lowering it at will, with endless resource in the slide and pause of the caesura, to carry it on and on. We feel it to be adequate, too, for quite plain straightforward narrative, as in this passage from "Balder Dead": But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose, The throne, from which his eye surveys the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the King. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds-- Hearing the wrathful Father coming home-- For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall: And in Valhalla Odin laid him down. Now of rhyme he were a fool who, with Lycidas, or Gray's "Elegy," or certain choruses of "Prometheus Unbound," or page after page of Victor Hugo in his mind, should assert it to be in itself inimical, or a hindrance, or even less than a help, to sublimity; or who, with Dante in his mind, should assert it to be, in itself, any bar to continuous and sustained sublimity. But languages differ vastly in their wealth of rhyme, and differ out of any proportion to their wealth in words: English for instance being infinitely richer than Italian in vocabulary, yet almost ridiculously poorer in dissyllabic, or feminine rhymes. Speaking generally, I should say that in proportion to its wonderful vocabulary, English is poor even in single rhymes; that the words 'love,' 'truth,' 'God,' for example, have lists of possible congeners so limited that the mind, hearing the word 'love,' runs forward to match it with 'dove' or 'above' or even with 'move': and this gives it a sense of arrest, of listening, of check, of waiting, which alike impedes the flow of Pope in imitating Homer, and of Spenser in essaying a sublime and continuous story of his own. It does well enough to carry Chaucer over any gap with a 'forsooth as I you say' or 'forsooth as I you tell': but it does so at a total cost of the sublime. And this (I think) was really at the back of Milton's mind when in the preface to "Paradise Lost" he championed blank verse against 'the jingling sound of like endings.'