d. for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Tormènts/him; roùnd/he thròws/his bàle/ful èyes/, (P.L., i, 56.)

e. And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nà/ture? Prè/sent fèars/
Are less than horrible imaginings. (Macb.I, iii, 137.)

f. rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded though immòr/tal: But/ his doom//
Preserv'd him to more wrath. (P.L., i, 53.)

These may be called divided duple units. As noted in paragraph 17 of Section III, such pauses dividing triple units caused the name “hypermetrical” o1 “supernumerary” to be given to one of the syllables of the unit. In the following verses the pause falls after the first, or so-called “hypermetrical” syllable:—

(2) a. are you aught
That man may quès/tion? You sèem/ to understand me,
(Macb., I, iii, 43.)
b. The rest is là/bour, which is/not used for you:
(Macb., I, iv, 44.)

In the following verses, however, the pause falls after the second syllable:—

(3.) a. from his sight receiv'd
Beatitude past ù/tterance; òn/his right/
The radiant image of his glory sat. (P.L., iii, 62.)

b. our graver business
Frowns at this lè/vity. Gèn/tle lords, let's part;
(Ant. & Cleo., II, vii, 128.)

In these it would be difficult to say which is the hypermetrical syllable, though an indication is afforded by a verse in Newton's Milton:—

(3.) b. The good befall'n him, author unsuspect, (P.L, ix, 771.)

The dropping of the “e” in “befallen” removes the unit from the category of those exampled in (3) a, and suggests that vowels in the other words might also be dropped, making “utterance” “utt'rance.” Is such barbarity preferable before the divided triple unit? Again it is a question of individual taste in reading; and if some, even a few, readers prefer to consider the words unmutilated, then the divided triple unit, as well as the divided duple, must be admitted by prosodists. A divided triple means a triple unit whose syllables are separated by a pause, and so with a divided duple: a paused duple unit is one composed of a pause and a syllable; a paused triple would simply be duple.

2. The question that arises is, seeing that the pause in the duple unit is an indication of potentiality towards a triple unit, is the pause in the triple unit an indication of potentiality towards a quadruple unit? The logical answer must be in the affirmative. There is no doubt that quadruple or four-syllabled units do occur not only in the unpolished yet invaluable ballads, but in the perfect and exalted verse of Shakspeare and Milton. Again examples are best evidence:—

(4.) a. abash'd the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Vir/tue in her shàpe/how lovely; saw, and pin'd
His loss; (P.L., iv, 847.)

and Antony,
Enthron'd i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whis/tling to the aìr/, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, (Ant. & Cleo., II, ii, 221.)

It may perhaps be admitted that such units do occur in isolation, whilst it is at the same time contended that for these to be other than exceptions it must be proved that the quadruple unit forms a basic unit in metrical schemes.

3. The proof is not, I think, impossible, and Australian poetry especially furnishes evidence. The more popular poetry of Australia is here referred to—poetry that sells in editions of tens of thousands. In spirit, as in popularity, it more nearly approaches the old English ballad—the ballad of humour, however, not of tragedy. Even in the best of the old ballads triple units constantly occur, and where the blending of duple and triple is artistic the effect is most pleasing. The triple units impart a “rapid” movement to the metre; and as the themes become more humorous, treating of the lighter rather than the more serious side of life, as in the Robin Hood ballads, this rapidity of movement becomes more and more marked, until many of the ballads are entirely triple. It was probably of the shallow jigging ballads that Shakspeare spoke through Hotspur in Henry IV:—

(5.) I had rather be a kitten and cry mew,
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers.

Quadruple units also occur in the old ballads, but not in very great abundance; their effect is proportionately more rapid than that given by triple units. The Australians, lovers of the horse and outdoor sport, loved and do love rapidity of motion; and it is natural that they should choose a metre that will give to their verse the exuberance of motion which they feel in daily life: triple metre was favoured, until supplanted by the even more rapid quadruple.

4. Lindsay Gordon stands father of the popular Australian poetry. Out of his sixty-seven collected poems, forty-five are triple, whilst only eighteen are duple. In four poems can be traced the germ of what was to become a dominant metre in Australian poetry: these four are “Unshriven,” “Whisperings in Wattle-boughs,” “A Hunting Song,” and his well-known and well-loved “Sick Stockrider.” The metre has been more developed by later writers, among them the favourites Paterson and Lawson. Paterson's first book opens with and takes its name from a piece in this very measure, “The Man from Snowy River.” Here the beat is much more distinct than in Gordon:—

(6.) There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush-horses—he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.

The usual reading of this stanza would require a stress on the first, third, and every odd syllable; but if it be so read it is instinctively felt to be quite wrongly read—the lilt is broken, the life is lost. Drop the first stress, however, the third, fifth, and every odd stress, and the dry bones of metre are vivified by the flowing life of verse:—

(7.) There was movè/ment at the stà/tion, for the wòrd/had passed aròund/
That the còlt/from old Regrèt/ had got awày/

There is a slight stress on “passed,” “old,” and “got,” but quite a subordinary stress; in fact, the stress has become a mere accent, and we have an expansion of the unit “old Night” in quotation (56) of Section III. The rhythm would be the same did we write,

(7a.) There was mòve/ment at the stà/tion, for the wòrd/pàssed ròund/,

this being the metre of Gilbert's

(8.) From a chèap/ and chippy chò/pper on a bg/, blàck blòck/.

Here “passed round” and “black block” are almost identical with “old Night.”

5. The following is half of the second stanza of “The Sick Stockrider”:—

(9.) Now westward winds the bridle-path that leads to Lindisfarm,
And yonder looms the double-headed Bluff;
From the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm,
You can see Sylvester's woolshed fair enough.

In this stanza, as has been noted above, the dropping of stresses is not so pronounced as in Paterson's stanza (6), but no reader would give the even stresses the same value as the odd ones, and in parts of the stanza every reader would suppress certain of them—

(9a.) From the fàr side of the first hill, when the skìes are clèar and càlm,

Furthermore, the dropping of the even stresses in Gordon's stanza gives us lines of four and three stresses alternately; giving every stress full value, the lines are of seven and five stresses alternately—a very rare combination. By dropping the alternate stresses, however, a pure ballad stanza results; a most unusual metre is changed to one most familiar, its only strangeness on first reading being its quadruple units. The Australian has, indeed, adopted the favourite measure of his ancestors, changing its externals, but not its essentials, in the process of acclimatisation.

6. In Paterson's stanza the odd stresses, but in Gordon's the even stresses, are suppressed. Given its full tale of stresses, Paterson's stanza wou'd be trochaic; Gordon's, iambic. Of Gordon's four quadruple pieces, two are in apparent iambs, one in trochees, whilst one is mixed; of Paterson's and Lawson's forty quadruple pieces, three only are in iambs, thirty-four in trochees, and three are mixed. Gordon has therefore been departed from so far as the original metre is concerned; the trochaic measure resolved itself into the quadruple much more frequently than the iambic. The reason probably is that in choosing the former, where the suppression of the first stress gave an initial unit of three syllables, an easier transition to the four-syllabled unit was obtained. The popularity of the quadruple metre may be seen from the fact that in Paterson's two volumes of verse, “The Man from Snowy River” and “Rio Grande's Last Ride,” in eighty-one pieces twelve are quadruple; in Lawson's two volumes, “In the Days when the World was Wide” and “Verses Popular and Humorous,” in one hundred and fourteen pieces twenty-eight are quadruple; Ogilvie, in “Fair Girls and Grey Horses,” has eleven in a hundred; Boake, in “Where the Dead Men Lie,” has four in thirty-two; Brunton Stephens, in “Poetical Works,” has the high average of twelve in fifty-seven.

7. Two quotations may be taken as contrasts of the original metre and its Australian development. In Kendall's imaginative and musical poem “Hy-Brasil” occur the lines,—

(10.) There indeed was singing Eden, where the great gold river runs
Past the porch and gates of crystal, ringed by strong and shining ones!
There indeed was God's own garden, sailing down the sapphire sea—
Lawny dells and slopes of summer, dazzling stream and radiant tree

Here it is impossible, except in perhaps two instances, to slur or suppress the odd stresses; but read in the same full-stressed way the following from

Lawson's “Australian Bards and Bush Reviewers,” and instead of humorous they are ridiculous:—

(11.) If you sing of waving grasses where the plains are dry as bricks,
And discover shining rivers where there's only mud and sticks;
If you picture “mighty forests” where the mulga spoils the view—
You're superior to kendall, and ahead of Gordon too.

8. There are, of course, many English poems with suggestions of the quadruple metre, and it is these suggestions that the Australian has taken, forming from them a basic quadruple unit. The loose lilt is evident in the Hon. Mrs. Norton's “Bingen on the Rhine,” and it gives charming effects to S. Ferguson's delightful Irish ballad “The Fairy Thorn”:—

(12.) They're glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve,
Away in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare;
The heavy-sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave,
And the crags in the ghostly air.

Christina Rossetti's “Amor Mundi,” too, is on the verge of the quadruple metre; parts, indeed, have crossed the border-line:—

(13.) “O where are you going with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.”

9. When the quadruple unit makes its appearance in triple metre, as in Scott's stanza,—

(14.) He is gone on the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Lake a summer dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest.

—it is evident that it is caused only by the feminine rimes, which add a syllable to the following triple unit. In Scott's stanza this occurs in the middle of the verse as well as at the end:—

(14a.) He is gone on the mountain, he is lost to the forest,
Like a summer dried fountain, when our need was the sorest.

The quadruple unit is twice avoided in the above stanza by taking one of the syllables from the three-syllabled unit following the feminine rime. These avoidances come as reliefs in reading: the stanza has certainly a not altogether unpleasing strangeness; but its very rarity shows that it is an unnatural form.

10. It is admitted that when the quadruple unit is most apparent in Australian poetry that poetry is not the highest. It is, however, the form that is under consideration rather than the spirit; and for laws of form a nursery-rime is as valuable as play of Shakspeare, an Australian ballad as an epic of Milton. In verse like “Constable M'Carty's Investigations,” by Lawson, there is absolutely no room for doubt of the existence of the quadruple unit:—

(15.) Most unpleasantly adjacent to the haunts of lower orders
Stood a “terrace” in the city when the current year began,
And a notice indicated there were vacancies for boarders
In the middle house, and lodgings for a single gentleman.

It may be objected that when the unit is thus proved to exist the poetry is at the same time proved not to exist; but the triple unit was once in like manner considered incapable of being made the vehicle of elevated poetry, and was banished. Keats, a poet of keenest vision in duple metre, was a poetaster in triple; but from the days of Cowper the triple metre

has been endowed more and more with the highest spirit of poetry. Does it not receive the perfect spirit of life at the hands of Swinburne in “Itylus,” and are not the duple and triple measures perfectly blended by him in “An Interlude”? Nor is the quadruple metre without indications of what it may throb to under master hands. The following lines are from Paterson's “Clancy of the Overflow”:—

(16.) And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

The majestic sweep of this unit is here filling with melody: another stop has, without doubt, been added to the organ of poesy.

11. In the same way as the duple and triple units, the quadruple may contain one syllable accented and one stressed, as in (16):—

(16a.) And the bùsh/hath frìends to mèet// him, and their kìn/dly vòices grèet/ him
In the mùr/mur of the brèe/zes and the rì/ver on its bàrs/,
And he sèes/the vìsion splèn// did of the sùn/lit plàins extèn//ded,
And at nìght/the wìndrous glò//ry of the è/verlasting stàrs/.

This alternation of light and heavy units gives a most pleasing effect. In the heavy units the unaccented syllables may be dropped, when a unit of two syllables, one accented and one stressed, results, differing from the ordinary heavy duple unit in the words being somewhat more separated with pauses. Such unit was exemplified in (7a and (8) of this section. The following stanza shows it in its Australian form:—

(17.) When you're lỳ/ing in your hàm/mock, slèeping sòft//and slèeping sòund//,
Withoùt/ a càre or troù//ble on your mìnd/,
And there's nò/thing to distùrb/you but the èn/gines gòing roùnd//,
And you're drèam/ing of the gìrl/you lèft behind//,
In the mì/ddle of your jòys/you'll be wà/kened by a noìse/,
And the clà/tter on the dèck/abòve your cròwn//,
And you'll hèar/ the còrporal shòut//as he tùrns/ the pìcket oùt/,
“There's anò/ther blèssed hòrse//fèll dòwn//.”
(Paterson, “There's another blessed Horse fell down.”)

Units such as the third and fourth in the fourth in the first line may be called “heavy quadruple units”; those like the last unit of the last line, “paused heavy quadruple units.”

12. Is a unit possible that shall contain more than four syllables? Isolated examples do occur. These again are found in the lightest and leastelevated forms of verse; but, as they are found, they must be noted. An example at the division of the verse may be found in Canning and Frere's “Ballynahinch,” stanza 2:—

(18.) The great stàte/sman, it seèm/, has perùsed/ all their fà/ces,
And being mì/ghtily strùck/ with their lòy/al grimà/ces;

and in Dibdin's “The Showman's Catalogue of Living Animals,” stanza 2:—

(19.) Here's brù/in, the beàr/, not fà/mous for grà/ces, O!
And his hùg's/like Mounsèer's/fratèr/nal embrà/ces, O!

In stanza 1 of Dibdin's poem such a unit occurs within the line,—

(20.) We've rare spècies of mònkeys, of sòrts nearly twènty;
Though a mòn/key's no rà/rity, for in t wn/ there are plèn/ ty;

Dibdin's stanzas are in the “Museum of Mirth,” and are presumably still sung, so these units cannot be considered as having been perpetuated merely through having been printed. They will be seen to be quite different from the units where a stress has been suppressed between a duple and triple