But when we pass from single rhymes to double, of which Dante had an inexhaustible store, we find the English poet almost a pauper; so nearly a pauper that he has to achieve each new rhyme by a trick--which tricking is fatal to rapture, alike in the poet and the hearer. Let me instance a poem which, planned for sublimity, keeps tumbling flat upon earth through the inherent fault of the machine--I mean Myers's "St Paul"--a poem which, finely conceived, pondered, worked and re-worked upon in edition after edition, was from the first condemned (to my mind) by the technical bar of dissyllabic rhyme which the poet unhappily chose. I take one of its most deeply felt passages--that of St Paul protesting against his conversion being taken for instantaneous, wholly accounted for by the miraculous vision related in the "Acts of the Apostles": Let no man think that sudden in a minute All is accomplished and the work is done;-- Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. Oh the regret, the struggle and the failing! Oh the days desolate and useless years! Vows in the night, so fierce and unavailing! Stings of my shame and passion of my tears! How have I seen in Araby Orion, Seen without seeing, till he set again, Known the night-noise and thunder of the lion, Silence and sounds of the prodigious plain! How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring Lifted all night in irresponsive air, Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring, Blank with the utter agony of prayer! 'What,' ye will say, `and thou who at Damascus Sawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice; So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us, Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice?' You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine. But do you not feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to Damascus has not really the time to cry 'Abba, father'? Is not your own rapture interrupted by some wonder 'How will he bring it off'? And when he has searched and contrived to `ask us,' are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not--if I may employ an Oriental trope for once--let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment[1]. As for triple rhymes--rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o' news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of Timbuctoo, with Bible, prayer-book, hymn-book too--they are for the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can remove them, from any "Paradise Lost" or "Regained." It may sound a genuine note, now and then: Alas! for the rarity Of Christian charity Under the sun! Oh, it was pitiful! Near a whole city full, Home she had none! But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric. III