Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

1. 76 RIHYME.
there appear any m2ark of constraint, either in the ideas or in the
expression, our pleasure is proportionally diminished. The
thoughts must seem to suggest each other, and the rhymes to be
only an accidental circumstance. The same remark may be
made on the measure of the verse. When in its greatest perfection, it does not appear to be the result of labor, but to be
dictated by nature, or prompted by inspiration. In Pope's best
verses, the idea is expressed with as little inversion of style, and
with as much conciseness, precision, and propriety, as the author
could have attained, had he been writing prose: without any
apparent exertion on his part, the words seem spontaneously to
arrange themselves in the most musical numbers.
" While still a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came."
This facility of versification, it is true, may be, and probably
is, in most cases, only apparent; and it is reasonable to think,
that in the most perfect poetical productions, not only the choice
of words, but the choice of ideas, is influenced by the rhymes.
In a prose composition, the author holds on in a direct course,
according to the plan he has previously formed; but in a poem,
the rhymes which occur to him are perpetually diverting him
to the right hand or to the left, by suggesting ideas which do
not naturally rise out of his subject. This, I presume, is Butler's meaning in the following: —
"' Rhymes the rudcier are of verses,
With which, like ships, they steer their courses."
But although this may be the case in fact, the poet must employ
all his art to conceal it: insomuch that if he finds himself under
a necessity to introduce, on account of the rhymes, a superfluous
idea, or an awkward expression, lie must place it in the first
line of the couplet, and not in the second; for the reader, naturally presuming that the lines were composed in the order in
which the author arranges them, is more apt to suspect the
second line to be accommodated to the first, than the first to the
second. And this slight artifice is, in general, sufficient to
impose on that degree of atterntion with which poetry is read.