(Practically a long blank-verse paragraph with the addition of rhyme, which sometimes almost escapes notice.)
The young surviving Iseult, one bright day, Had wander'd forth. Her children were at play In a green cir|cular hol|low in the heath Which borders the sea-shore--a country path Creeps over it from the till'd fields behind. The hollow's grassy banks are soft-inclined, And to one standing on them, far and near The lone unbroken view spreads bright and clear Over the waste. This cirque of open ground Is light and green; the heather, which āll rōund Creeps thickly, grows not here; but the pale grass Is strewn with rocks, and many a shiver'd mass Of vein'd white-gleaming quartz, and here and there Dōttĕd with holly-trees and juniper.
(An admirable following of Keats's model; the rhymes not too much kept out of view, and suggestions of trochaic and spondaic as well as trisyllabic substitution deftly used. For some strange reason he never returned to it, but left it for William Morris to develop, completely and most effectively, in _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_.)
(_e_) Tennyson very seldom tried the couplet, but when he did, as in "The Vision of Sin," he achieved it magnificently:
I had a vision when the night was late: A youth came riding toward a palace gate. He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown But that his heavy rider kept him down. And from the palace came a child of sin, And took him by the curls and led him in, Where sat a company with heated eyes, Expecting when a fountain should arise: A sleepy light upon their brows and lips-- As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse, Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes-- Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes, By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.
(Observe how fine this couplet is, and how _personal_. We have seen how Keats studied Dryden: this is as if Dryden had studied Keats.)
(_f_) Mr. Swinburne (_Tristram of Lyonesse_):
Love, that is first and last of all things made, The light that has the living world for shade, The spirit that for tem|poral veil | has on The souls of all men, wo|ven in un|ison, One fi|ery rai|ment with all lives inwrought And lights of sun|ny and star|ry deed and thought.