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 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not to speak of his blank verse; but In Memoriam is in the shorter line, and from the first, from the 'Chorus in an unpublished drama written early,' he used the shorter line in its full strength:—

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:—