"Or to take arms against a sea of troub(les)."]
1. "If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs and dying gales." —_Collins_, _Ode to Evening._
2. "But never could I tune my reed At morn, or noon, or eve, so sweet, As when upon the ocean shore I hail'd thy star-beam mild." —_Kirke White_, _Shipwrecked Solitary's Song_.
3. "Who at this untimely hour Wanders o'er the desert sands? No station is in view, No palm-grove islanded amidst the waste,— The mother and her child, The widow'd mother and the fatherless boy, They at this untimely hour Wander o'er the desert sands."[13] —_Southey_, _Thalaba_.
4. "Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wast not thou born in my father's dwelling? So might we talk of the old familiar faces." —_Lamb_.
5. "See how he scorns all human arguments So that no oar he wants, nor other sail Than his own wings between so distant shores."[14] —_Longfellow_, _Translation of Dante_.
6. "Yet dost thou recall Days departed, half-forgotten, When in dreamy youth I wander'd By the Baltic." —_Longfellow_, _To a Danish Song-Book_.
7. "All things in earth and air Bound were by magic spell Never to do him harm; Even the plants and stones, All save the mistletoe, The sacred mistletoe." —_Longfellow_, _Tegner's Drapa_.
8. "Give me of your bark, O birch-tree! Of your yellow bark, O birch-tree! Growing by the rushing river, Tall and stately in the valley." —_Longfellow_, _Hiawatha_.
9. "Heard he that cry of pain; and through the hush that succeeded Whisper'd a gentle voice, in accents tender and saintlike, 'Gabriel, oh, my beloved!' and died away into silence." —_Longfellow, Evangeline_.
An extremely musical form of blank verse, the trochaic, will be found in Browning's "One Word More":—
"I shall never in the years remaining, Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, Make you music that should all-express me; So it seems; I stand on my attainment: This of verse alone one life allows me; Verse and nothing else have I to give you. Other heights in other loves, God willing— All the gifts from all the heights, your own, love!"
This by no means exhausts the varieties of blank verse; but, as I have already said, blank verse is, on the whole, scarcely to be commended to the student for practice, because it is, while apparently the easiest, in reality the most difficult form he could attempt. It is in fact particularly easy to attain the blankness—but the verse is another matter. The absence of rhymes necessitates the most perfect melody and harmony, if the lines are to be anything beyond prose chopped up into lengths.