Of this form the most generally used is the Spenserian, or the following variation of it:—
"A little, sorrowful, deserted thing, Begot of love and yet no love begetting; Guiltless of shame, and yet for shame to wring; And too soon banish'd from a mother's petting To churlish nature and the wide world's fretting, For alien pity and unnatural care; Alas! to see how the cold dew kept wetting His childish coats, and dabbled all his hair Like gossamers across his forehead fair." —_Hood_, _Midsummer Fairies_.
The Spenserian has the same arrangement of the rhymes, but has an extra foot in the last line. The two last lines of a stanza from "Childe Harold" will illustrate this:—
"To mingle with the universe and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." —_Byron._
The formation of the ten, eleven, twelve, &c., line stanzas is but an adaptation of those already described. A single fourteen-line stanza of a certain arrangement of rhyme is a sonnet, but as the sonnet is scarcely versifiers' work, I will not occupy space by the lengthy explanation it would require. On the same grounds, I am almost inclined to omit discussion of blank verse, but will give a brief summary of its varieties. The ordinary form of blank verse is the decasyllabic in which Milton's "Paradise Lost" is written—
"Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe."
This consists of ten syllables with an accented following an unaccented syllable. It is preserved from monotony by the varying fall of the cæsura or pause. It occurs but rarely after the first foot or the eighth foot, and not often after the third and seventh. Elisions and the substitution of a trisyllable, equivalent in time for a dissyllable, are met with, and at times the accent is shifted, when by the change the sense of the line gains in vigour of expression, as in—
"Once found, which yet unfound, most would have thought Impossible."
According to scansion "most wo'uld," but by the throwing back of the accent strengthened and distinguished into "_most_ would have thought." [In addition to this in the blank verse of the stage, we find occasionally additional syllables, as—