call it) or area on which the house stands. The Stanza of three rhyming verses is called a Triplet. It is occasionally introduced, in Heroic Poems, among Couplets; and is, erroneously, said to have been first employed by Dryden. It seldom adds to the harmony; but, in translations, it sometimes preserves the energy, by enabling the poet to compress in three lines what must otherwise be expanded into four. Our older poets cut the difficulty; for, when the sense was completed, they did not scruple to place a full stop at the end of the first line of a Couplet, and to begin a new sentence, or even a new paragraph, with the second line. This practice seems still more awkward than the treble Rhymes; nevertheless, nothing can warrant the latter but the incapacity of avoiding them. Their unexpected occurrence mars the harmony of the Couplets with which they are usually intermingled; and, even in those few poems which are written wholly in that stanza, the effect is disagreeable.

Quatrains (a French denomination from quatre, four) are four-lined stanzas; of which there are several varieties. The simplest, and probably the earliest, is formed by cutting up the Alexandrine and other long-lined couplets into Hemistichs, as formerly noticed. Those vary from couplets in no other respect, and are quatrains only to the eye. The metrical Psalms are almost wholly in this form of verse: sometimes of twelve and fourteen, alternate syllables; but more generally all of fourteen; or what are familiarily called "eights and sixes.” Thus,

How blest is he who ne'er consents

by ill Advice to walk;
Nor stands in Sinners Way, nor sits

where men profanely talk.

This (which we have taken from the authorized version of the first Psalm) is also termed the ballad stanza; because, in it, almost all our old ballads are written. The composition requires little art; for it contains many words in tion to the rhymes. A consonance between terminations of the first and third lines is a modern improvement; as is also the occasional, or regular, insertion of double Rhymes:

words in propor

Ah! why, since oceans, rivers, streams,

That water all the nations,
Pay tribute to thy glorious beams,

In constant exhalations;-
Why, stooping from the noon of day,

Too covetous of drink,
Apollo, hast thou stolen away,

A poet's drop of ink?

These quatrains become more melodious when, by adding two syllables to the shorter lines, the whole are of equal length:

Oh, happy shades,-to me unbless’d,

Friendly to peace but not to me!
How ill the scene that offers rest,

And heart that cannot rest agree!
That glassy stream,--this spreading pine ;

Those alders quivering to the breeze,
Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine,

And please, if any thing could please.

The Heroic, or ten-syllable verse, whether in couplets, or in quatrains, is also generally appropriated to Elegy; and it will be perceived that the stanzas last quoted have all the requisites of Elegiac Verse, and, in fact, are the same, with the elision of two syllables. Friendly, in the second line is a Trochee, with which Heroics are permitted to begin; and there would be nothing objectionable in double rhymes. Indeed, there are few of the ten-syllable lines of our would-be poets, which might not be advantageously reduced to this shorter measure. Epithets are generally adjectives of two syllables, and are often mere expletives. Pope's Verses on the Death of an unfortunate Lady furnishes a beautiful example of the ten-syllable Elegiac couplet,as Gray's Lines on a Church Yard does of the quatrain. The following is a specimen with alternate double Rhymes:

Farewell, oh native Spain! farewell for ever!

These banish'd eyes shall view thy coasts no more: A mournful presage tells my heart, that never

Gonzalvo's steps again shall press thy shore. Hush'd are the winds, while soft the vessel sailing,

With gentle motion, ploughs th' unruffled main : I feel my bosom's boasted courage failing,

And curse the waves that bear me far from Spain.

The effect of those double terminations has, as formerly mentioned, a near resemblance to the feminine Rhymes of the French.

There is another form of the four-lined Stanza, in which the first Rhymes to the fourth and the second to the third :

O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray

Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,

Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill, While the jolly hours lead on propitious day.

But this form is seldom used except in conjunction with other stanzas; and, in that case, is rather a part of a compound. It chiefly appears in Sonnets such as that from which we have taken the preceding extract, and is of Italian origin. The true English quatrain is that of alternate rhymes. The elison of a syllable is often allowable in verse; but that of the y in jolly, is scarcely pardonable even in Milton.

Stanzas of five lines are seldom seen in modern poetry. The following is from Chaucer:

The God of Love and benedicité,
How mighty and how great a Lord is he !
For he can make of lowé hertés bie,
And of his lowe and lyké for to die,

And hardé hertés he can maken free.

Of the conjunction of six lines, we find an example in the same poet. He thus encourages wives to preserve their rights:

Ne dredeth hem not, doth hem no reverence,

For though thin husbande armed be in maile,
The arrowes of thy crabbed eloquence

Shall pierce his brest, and eke his adventaile.
In jelousye eke, loké thou him binde
And that shal make him couch as doth a quaile.

The Rhymes of all the stanzas are the same. They echo one another, and thereby give a curious kind of uniformity to the Poem.

Another form of the six-lined Stanza is made by adjoining a couplet to a quatrain; but the most regular is that which, preceded by one of