one of the employees of Thomas Webb of Stourbridge, a firm that had been making iridescent glass since 1878, took out a patent for “vasa Murrhina,” a type of spangle or splatterdash glass with a transparent body which was embedded with flakes of mica.

Despite their careless scholarship and a less tangible quality that some would call a tin ear for poetry, Morris Halle and S. J. Keyser, as metrists, have the considerable virtue of explicitness.

Some strange noises were coming from up above, but I continued to climb.

The danger for the couplet, a short endlessly recurrent metre, is an effect of sameishness.