F. Utmost spiritual contents in the words; so that each carries not only its instant meaning, but a cloudy companionship of higher or darker meaning according to the passion--nearly always indicated by metaphor: "play a set"--sometimes by abstraction--(thus in the second passage "silence" for silent one) sometimes by description instead of direct epithet ("coffined" for dead) but always indicative of there being more in the speaker's mind than he has said, or than he can say, full though his saying be. On the quantity of this attendant fullness depends the majesty of style; that is to say, virtually, on the quantity of contained thought in briefest words, such thought being primarily loving and true: and this the sum of all--that nothing can be well said, but with truth, nor beautifully, but by love. 68. These are the essential conditions of noble speech in prose and verse alike, but the adoption of the form of verse, and especially rymed verse, means the addition to all these qualities of one more; of music, that is to say, not Eolian merely, but Apolline; a construction or architecture of words fitted and befitting, under external laws of time and harmony. When Byron says "rhyme is of the rude,"[81] he means that Burns needs it,--while Henry the Fifth does not, nor Plato, nor Isaiah--yet in this need of it by the simple, it becomes all the more religious: and thus the loveliest pieces of Christian language are all in ryme--the best of Dante, Chaucer, Douglas, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. 69. I am not now able to keep abreast with the tide of modern scholarship; (nor, to say the truth, do I make the effort, the first edge of its waves being mostly muddy, and apt to make a shallow sweep of the shore refuse:) so that I have no better book of reference by me than the confused essay on the antiquity of ryme at the end of Turner's "Anglo-Saxons." I cannot however conceive a more interesting piece of work, if not yet done, than the collection of sifted earliest fragments known of rymed song in European languages. Of Eastern I know nothing; but, this side Hellespont, the substance of the matter is all given in King Canute's impromptu "Gaily" (or is it sweetly?--I forget which, and it's no matter) "sang the monks of Ely, As Knut the king came sailing by;"