odd, unnatural, paradoxical. Except for the "poetic diction" of
putting "Goddess" after "Circe" instead of before it, the first stave
is merely a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not
inharmonious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance of the
strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some the worst fault of the
piece, the profusion of broken-up decasyllables, which sometimes
suggest a very "corrupt" manuscript, or a passage of that singular
stuff in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, nor any
other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many instances--

"Is it, then, evening
So soon? [_I see the night-dews
Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc.

* * *
["_When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks. _"]

* * *
["_Thanks, gracious One!
Ah! the sweet fumes again._"]

* * *
["_They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens._"]

One could treble these--indeed in one instance (the
sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of _eleven_ lines, by the
insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of
_seven_, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three "weak-ended,"