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.’

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!