Browning's poem of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," the movement changes,
and instead of a more or less equal stress on the alternate syllables,
the full ictus is only felt in one syllable out of every four; in
ancient metrical language the metre becomes Ionic a minore. This very
Ionic a minore is itself, I need not say, the metre of a single Ode in
the Third Book, the "Miserarum est," and I have devised a stanza for
it, taking much more pains with the apportionment of the ictus than in
the case of the trochaic quatrain, which is better able to modulate
itself. I have also ventured to invent a metre for that technically
known as the Fourth Archilochian, the "Solvitur acris hiems," by
combining the fourteen-syllable with the ten-syllable iambic in an
alternately rhyming stanza. [Footnote: I may be permitted to mention
that Lord Derby, in a volume of Translations printed privately before
the appearance of this work, has employed the same measure in rendering
the same Ode, the only difference being that his rhymes are not
alternate, but successive.] The First Archilochian, "Diffugere nives,"
I have represented by a combination of the ten-syllable with the four-
syllable iambic. For the so-called greater Sapphic, the "Lydia, die per
omnes" I have made another iambic combination, the six-syllable with
the fourteen-syllable, arranged as a couplet. The choriambic I thought
might be exchanged for a heroic stanza, in which the first line should
rhyme with the fourth, the second with the third, a kind of "In
Memoriam" elongated. Lastly, I have chosen the heroic quatrain proper,
the metre of Gray's "Elegy," for the two Odes in the First Book written
in what is called the Metrum Alcmanium, "Laudabunt alii," and "Te maris
et terrae," rather from a vague notion of the dignity of the measure
than from any distinct sense of special appropriateness.

From this enumeration, which I fear has been somewhat tedious, it will
be seen that I have been guided throughout not by any systematic