I got (both from my mother, with her Wimbledon accent, and my nursery-rhyme video, with its mock-bbc accent):

...Right in the middle
Of her "FORRID"

I suppose Americans would phoneticise [sp?] it as 'far-ed' - for me, 'forr' rhymes with the first part of lorry.

So it therefore rhymes quite easily with 'horrid'.

But then, different accents, different things rhyme... And it's already been proved thet my version's wrong anyway, even having a different tune (how THAT happened when it was written relatively recently, I don't know). So I may just have the pronounciation wrong, too.

I have never heard anyone else refer to a forehead as a forrid - anyone know if it was a common word back then (or even now, somewhere), or if Mr. Longfellow just 'twisted' them to fit the rhyme?

-Viracocha
-Viracocha