II 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight
in prolongations For example, he makes such words as _glorious_,
_gratious_, _joyeous_, _havior_, _chapelet_ dactyles, and that, not
at the end of verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in
the first half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as
it were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the
opposite of this. He also shuns a _hiatus_ which does not seem to
have been generally dipleasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps in
the compound epithet _bees-alluring_ he intentionally avoids it by
the plural form.
[288]
"Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep
Is broken with some fearful dream's affright,
With froward will doth set himself to weep
Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might,
But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight,
Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing,
Now seeking darkness and now seeking light,
Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing."
He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of
Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the
Illiad. So also in the "Epithalamion" it grates our nerves to hear,
"Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful,
Pour out to all that wull.
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