of monosyllables in English is of course a reason for acquiescing in
lines shorter than the corresponding lines in Latin; but even in
English polysyllables are often necessary, and still oftener desirable
on grounds of harmony; and an allowance of twenty-eight syllables of
English for thirty-eight of Latin is, after all, rather short.

For the place of the Alcaic there are various candidates. Mr. Tennyson
has recently invented a measure which, if not intended to reproduce the
Alcaic, was doubtless suggested by it, that which appears in his poem
of "The Daisy," and, in a slightly different form, in the "Lines to Mr.
Maurice." The two last lines of the latter form of the stanza are
indeed evidently copied from the Alcaic, with the simple omission of
the last syllable of the last line of the original. Still, as a whole,
I doubt whether this form would be as suitable, at least for a
dignified Ode, as the other, where the initial iambic in the last line,
substituted for a trochec, makes the movement different. I was
deterred, however, from attempting either, partly by a doubt whether
either had been sufficiently naturalized in English to be safely
practised by an unskilful hand, partly by the obvious difficulty of
having to provide three rhymes per stanza, against which the occurrence
of one line in each without a rhyme at all was but a poor set-off. A
second metre which occurred to me is that of Andrew Marvel's Horatian
Ode, a variety of which is found twice in Mr. Keble's Christian Year.
Here two lines of eight syllables are followed by two of six, the
difference between the types being that in Marvel's Ode the rhymes are
successive, in Mr. Keble's alternate. The external correspondence
between this and the Alcaic is considerable; but the brevity of the
English measure struck me at once as a fatal obstacle, and I did not
try to encounter it. A third possibility is the stanza of "In
Memoriam," which has been adopted by the clever author of "Poems and