magnificent command of rhythm and of sound. As a verbal melodist,
especially a melodist of sweetness and of stately grace, and as a harmonist
of prolonged and complex cadences, he is unsurpassable. But he has full
command of his rhythm according to the subject, and can range from the most
delicate suggestion of airy beauty to the roar of the tempest or the
strident energy of battle. In vocabulary and phraseology his fluency
appears inexhaustible. Here, as in 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' he
deliberately introduces, especially from Chaucer, obsolete words and forms,
such as the inflectional ending in _-en_, which distinctly contribute
to his romantic effect. His constant use of alliteration is very skilful;
the frequency of the alliteration on _w_ is conspicuous but apparently
accidental.

5. _The Spenserian Stanza._ For the external medium of all this beauty
Spenser, modifying the _ottava rima_ of Ariosto (a stanza which rimes
_abababcc_), invented the stanza which bears his own name and which is
the only artificial stanza of English origin that has ever passed into
currency. [Footnote: Note that this is not inconsistent with what is said
above, p. 102, of the sonnet.] The rime-scheme is _ababbcbcc_, and in
the last line the iambic pentameter gives place to an Alexandrine (an
iambic hexameter). Whether or not any stanza form is as well adapted as
blank verse or the rimed couplet for prolonged narrative is an interesting
question, but there can be no doubt that Spenser's stanza, firmly unified,
in spite of its length, by its central couplet and by the finality of the
last line, is a discovery of genius, and that the Alexandrine, 'forever
feeling for the next stanza,' does much to bind the stanzas together. It
has been adopted in no small number of the greatest subsequent English
poems, including such various ones as Burns' 'Cotter's Saturday Night,'
Byron's 'Childe Harold,' Keats' 'Eve of St. Agnes,' and Shelley's
'Adonais.'