In his other well-known odes, To a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, and To Melancholy, Keats made slight changes in the order in which he satisfied the rimes toward the ends of some of his stanzas. In this he was perhaps following the example of Spenser who, as we have seen, did not make all his stanzas exactly correspond. The first stanza of the Grecian Urn rimes ababcdedce, and the second, ababcdeced. One wonders whether there is anything gained by thus slightly disappointing the ear of the reader?

Coleridge's Ode to Tranquillity is of a different type. The four stanzas have six lines of tetrameter followed by a pentameter and end in an alexandrine:

Tranquillity! Thou better name

Than all the family of fame!
Thou ne'er wilt leave my riper age
To low intrigue, or factious rage;

For oh! Dear child of thoughtful truth,

To thee I gave my early youth,

And left the bark, and blest the Steadfast shore,

Ere yet the tempest rose and scared me with its roar.

One of the finest examples of stanzas of varying meters is Milton's splendid Nativity Hymn. This is made up of eight lines of trimeter, pentameter, tetrameter, and a final alexandrine. The rime runs aabccbdd, for example:

Ring out, ye crystal spheres!

Once bless our human ears

If ye

have power to touch our senses so,

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow;

And with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.

Shelley's Skylark has stanzas of four lines of trimeter-normally trochaic-concluding with an alexandrine: (ababb)

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

An even simpler stanza is that used by Marvell in his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.

The forward youth that would appear,

Must now forsake his Muses dear,

Nor in the Shadows sing

His numbers languishing.

And Cowper's Boadicea is composed merely of trochaic tetrameter quatrains.

Collins's much admired Ode to Evening is made up of unrimed four line stanzas:4

If ought of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs and dying gales.

O nymph reserv'd, while now the bright-hair'd sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is also unique among Odes in its form. It is made up of five fourteen-line sections, each section written in terza rima with a concluding couplet.

Evidently then, stanzaic odes may be written in almost any form that pleases the poet. Swinburne has exercised his liberty in this respect, and among his dozen or so odes may be found some extremely interesting examples in the long measures, triple rhythms, and difficult rime schemes of which he is so great a master. The student of the form

4 For an elaborate discussion of this and other odes of Collins's see W. C. Bronson's Edition of Collins in the "Athenæum Press Series."

should not neglect the odes to March, to England, to Eton, and the birthday and New-Year odes to Victor Hugo.

Regular Pindaric Odes.-The distinguishing characteristic of the regular Pindaric form is the threefold division into strophe, antistrophe and epode. These represent the choral divisions of the Greek odes on which the English were modeled. Pindar's odes were sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, or lyre and flute, with some sort of dignified dance; during the singing of the strophe the chorus moved across the hall or temple, moved back during the antistrophe, and stood still at the epode. The strophe and antistrophe correspond in form, but the epode differs from them. The forms for these divisions may be constructed, at the will of the poet, of any number of lines, and in English odes, in any meter or combination of meters. No two of Pindar's have the same metrical scheme. His strophes are made up of from four to sixteen lines, combining various short and long meters. The English Poets have carefully rimed their Pindaric strophes, but usually in a simpler way than the complicated interweaving of the stanzaic odes of Keats. Ordinarily Pindaric odes are long enough to repeat the arrangement of strophe, antistrophe, and epode several times, thus dividing the poem into a number of grand divisions. Pindar has an ode of thirteen of these divisions. Gray's odes have but three. Each time the strophic arrangement is repeated it is in exact correspondence with the first. The larger strophic groups correspond to the general divisions of thought in the progressively developing theme, but poets have rarely attempted to make a threefold subdivision of each part to correspond to the division into strophe, antistrophe, and epode.

The regular Pindaric is somewhat rare in English, though two or three of them happen to be very well known. Probably one reason that they have not been more practiced is that the labor expended in their composition seems useless, for the strophic correspondences are so far apart that the

reader can perceive them only after a close analysis. The appreciation of the structure of Gray's Bard in which the metrical scheme repeats itself after an interval of forty-eight lines, is an intellectual rather than an æsthetic pleasure. Gray himself said that the strophic divisions should not be longer than nine lines each, but he did not follow out his own principle. The Greek audiences at the celebrations at which Pindar's odes were sung, had the advantage over the reader of these English imitations in that the repetition of the accompaniment and the movements of the chorus made the structure easy to follow. Thus the strict Pindaric when introduced into English becomes an exotic which cannot be acclimatized.

There is scarcely room to quote a whole Pindaric as an example. Here are the concluding strophe, antistrophe, and epode of Gray's Progress of Poesy, the most perfect of its type in English.

III. 1

Far from the sun and summer-gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,

To Him the mighty Mother did unveil
Her awful face: The dauntless Child
Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled.
This pencil take (she said) whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy;

Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic Tears.

III. 2

Nor second He, that rode sublime

Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy,
The secrets of th' Abyss to spy.

He pass'd the flaming bound of Place and Time:

The living Throne, the sapphire-blaze,
Where Angels tremble, while they gaze,
He saw, but blasted with excess of light,

Closed his eyes in endless night.

Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car

Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear

Two Coursers of ethereal race,

With necks in thunder cloth'd, and long-resounding pace.

III. 3

Hark, his hands the lyre explore!

Bright-eyed Fancy hovering o'er

Scatters from her pictur'd urn

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

But ah! 'tis heard no more

Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit

Wakes thee now? tho' he inherit
Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban Eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro' the azure deep of air:

Yet oft before his infant eyes would run
Such forms, as glitter in the Muse's ray
With orient hues, unborrow'd of the Sun:

Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far-but far above the Great.

Gray's other Pindaric, the Bard, is romantic in theme, but quite as severely perfect in structure. Its strophic divisions are longer than those just quoted. Collins placed the epodes of his regular Pindaric odes between the strophe and the antistrophe, but what the advantage may be is hardly apparent. He rimed his epodes, which are longer than Gray's, in couplets or quatrains. His short ode To Mercy has no epode; this is a peculiarity of the three brief processional odes of Pindar. Shelley understood the Pindaric form so imperfectly that his Ode to Naples begins with two epodes; then come two strophes, four antistrophes, and two