clearly; its base is generally the octosyllable. The poets may sometimes be divided into the one class or the other; thus Spenser, with the great Italian poets, belongs almost entirely to the first order; Burns, with Villon, to the second. Tennyson is of both parties; he uses the fuller measure, the larger period, in The Lotos Eaters, not to speak of his blank verse; but In Memoriam is in the shorter line, and from the first, from the 'Chorus in an unpublished drama written early,' he used the shorter line in its full strength:—
Each sun which from the centre flings
Grand music and redundant fire,
The burning belts, the mighty rings,
The murmurous planets' rolling choir.
Gray had the same equal skill in both kinds. The Pindaric odes belong to the first; while for the second we may quote The Long Story:—
Full oft within the spatious walls,
When he had fifty winters o'er him,
My grave Lord-Keeper led the brawls;
The seals and maces danc'd before him.
