"From you have I been absent in the spring When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Ilad put a spirit of youth in everything, And heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him."

It is impossible to read these lines without feeling their fullness: they are an extreme and rare example of that quality.

When the most perfect mellowness and continuity is joined with the greatest fullness, as in the first line of the Iliad,

"Mèenin äidee Theea, Peeleèïadeō Akileeos, Oulomence,"

in which the most excellent musical quality of verse is perceived, it affects the ear with a sense of conjoined power and sweetness. But as the air in music is not only divided into four parts, like the stanza which it accompanies, but also into bars, or lesser equal portions of time-three, four, or more equal bars going to fill out the lines, marked by accents, and separated by pauses of imperceptible length in singing-so, the line of significant sounds, in a verse, is also marked by accents, or pulses, and divided into portions called feet. These are necessary and natural, for the very simple reason that continuity by itself is tedious; and the greatest pleasure arises from the union of continuity with variety. In the line,

"Full many a tàle theír mùsic tèlls,"

there are at least four accents or stresses of the voice, with faint pauses after them, just enough to separate the continuous stream of sound into these four parts, to be read thus

feeling is given to the words, which almost overwhelms their meaning as prose, and the agreeable blending and running together of the words, doubtless gives rise to a similar blending and melody of images and emotions in the imagination, producing a kind of music of the mind. Lines of a good quality are always filled out with a due complement of sound: such verses as are not well filled out are characterized as 'lean and flashy," without body or strength. In criticising a poem, therefore, it is good to divide the lines by the ear, and observe whether the musical divisions, or feet, have the proper fullness.

And here again the law of variety, perfecting continuity, reappears, for if the feet and dull. It is necessary either, that one, of a line are all equally full, it will be heavy two, or three of the feet, should be shorter than the others, and this, too, by a certain fixed quantity of sound, as in the line

"Auream quisquis mediocritatem,"

which, when musically divided, reads thus,

Aure--àmquisq--ùismědi-òcrit―atem,

the first and fourth musical or metrical divisions having a less quantity of sound than the second, third and fifth :—Or, that these divisions having all an equal quantity of sound, some of them should be broken up into lesser portions; just as a bar of two minims, in the air, is broken into a minim and two crotchets; or a crotchet, in a bar of two crotchets, is broken into a crotchet and two quavers.

"Hic subitam nigro glomerari pulvere nubem,” to be read thus,

Hicsubit-àmnigr-òglomer-àrip-ùlveren—

ùbem,

in which the six divisions, or musical metres, are of equal length, or require an equal stress and duration of the voice in speaking or chanting, but are differently divided; some into two heavy, or long syllables, and some into three, one heavy and two light; the two light requiring no more force of voice or time in uttering, than the one long.

at

which structure leaving the verse incomplete, the voice makes a natural pause the end of the line, just equal in length to one long time or metre, thus, |—│·

By changing the place of the short syllable the character of the verse would also be changed, as it would also be, by the addition of another long syllable, in place of the pause at the end.

The second and fourth verses, on the other hand, consist of two spondees and two iambuses, thus,

~-1--1--1-

and have an effect of their own, very different from that of the others. To give these delicate metres a lean and flashy effect, or to make them heavy and dull, we have only to substitute short quantities where there are long ones, and vice

versa.

If any person who is accustomed to read verse critically, and is endowed by nature with a nice car for quantity, well exercised in the classic metres, will read a piece of excellent verse by some master hand, he will probably find some of the lines more full and sonorous than others. On dividing these by their musical accents, as in Greek scanning, they will be found to consist of full and regular feet, spondees and iambuses, for example, alternating variously. If the poem be a classic and regular lyric, like one of Horace's odes, the alternations will be the same throughout; and every departure from the model will be observed, as injurious to the musical or lyrical quality of the poem. But if the verse be narrative or descriptive, didactic or heroic, or if it be the blank verse of epic or dramatic poetry, the places of the iambuses and spondees will be continually varied, so as to give the greatest possible variety to the verses. Take, for example, these lines of Pope :-

In Pope's poetry the line is often weak and light-as in Milton it is sometimes too heavy-through the employment of false quantities; but it rarely or never happens, that they fall into monotony by repeating too frequently the same form of metrical arrangement. With a little practice, it becomes easy to detect the short syllables in Pope's verse, and his is perhaps the best to begin with, in cultivating the ear. A short vowel sound followed by a double consonantal sound, usually makes a long quantity; so also does a long vowel The metrical accents, which often differ in beauty, before a from the prosaic, mostly fall upon the heavy sounds; which must also be prolonged in reading, and never slurred or lightened, unless to help out a bad verse. In our language the groupings of the consonants furnish a great number of spondaic feet, and give the language, especially its more ancient forms, as in the verse of Milton and the prose of Lord Bacon, a grand and solemn character.

like

y

consonant,

One vowel followed by another, unless the first be naturally made long in the reading, makes a short quantity, as in the old. So, also, a short vowel followed time or quantity, as in to give. by a single short consonant, gives a short A great and short quantities have yet to be invented, variety of rules for the detection of long or applied from the Greek and Latin prosody. In all languages they are of course the same, making due allowance for difference of organization; but it is as absurd to suppose that the Greeks should have a system of prosody differing in principle from our own, as that their rules of musical harmony should be different from the modern. Both result from the nature of the ear and of the organ of speech, and are consequently the same in all ages and nations.

The two elements of musical metre, namely, time and accent, both together

constituting quantity, are equally elements of the metre of verse. Each iambic foot or metre, is marked by a swell of the voice, concluding abruptly in an accent, or interruption, on the last sound of the foot; or, in metres of the trochaic order, in such words as dandy, handy, bottle, favor, labor, it begins with a heavy accented sound, and declines to a faint or light one at the close. The line is thus composed of a series of swells or waves of sound, concluding and beginning alike. The accents, or points at which the voice is most forcibly exerted in the feet, being the divisions of time, by which a part of its musical character is given to the verse, are usually made to coincide, in our language, with the accents of the words as they are spoken; which diminishes the musical character of our verse. In Greek hexameters and Latin hexameters, on the contrary, this coincidence is avoided, as tending to monotony and a prosaic character.

Thus in the line from Virgil:

"Còrpora curàmus fèssos sòpor irrigat artus,"

to be read metrically

so forcibly as to destroy their effect. Some languages, the French for example, seem to be without accent; and as the prosaic stress of voice is variable and arbitrary, good readers of verse make it as little conspicuous as possible.

As it frequently happens that word and verse accent fall differently, so is it with the division of the sounds by syllables: the verse syllables, like the verse feet, differ in the prosaic and metrical reading of the line. Thus, in the verse,

"How cunningly the sorceress displays,"

the metrical structure requires us to read, Howcunn-inglyth-ĕsorc―ĕressd-isplays ;

or in the following,

"That the shrewd meddling elf delights to make,"

which it is necessary to read,

Thattheshrewdmeddl--ingelfd-ělightst

ŏmake;"

àrtus,

two of the accents are thrown out of their natural places by the breaking of the words into feet. But, in such cases, by reading the line with regard merely to time, and the joining of the syllables in feet, the prosaic accents may be introduced beside; but this can be done only by a person possessed of a very nice ear.

Although this interference of the word and verse accents is most noticeable in the Latin hexametrical metre, it is very frequent in Milton. Take, for example, the lines:

"Scatter your leaves before the mèllowing year, Bitter constraint and sàd occasion dear;"

to be read metrically thus,

Scattè-ryourleàvesb-&c.
Bittèrc-onstraint-&c.

But after all, it does not seem to be necessary to verse, that the time accents be marked all that is required is to give time, and fullness, to the long metrical syllables, and not to give the prose accent

ing the quantities. The word the, for example, is short, standing by itself, and we should read,

That the shrewd, &c.;

but, remembering that in a line of verse the feet, and not the words, are to be separated, we write,

Thattheshrewd, &c.,

by which it appears that the first foot is a very heavy spondee, instead of being, as might appear, if we read it thus, That thě, a trochee.

It seems, from an examination, by the ear, of the structure of Greek, Latin, and English verse, that the metrical are perfectly distinct from the prosaic properties of verse; the most melodious verse may be composed of sounds devoid of meaning; a line of meaningless sounds such as the following,

Nootalmonalltaidoughraplantipall,

illustrates as perfectly the properties of

the English iambic heroic line, as the most sublime verse of the Paradise Lost; and when we divide it metrically, it falls, not into words, of course, nor into prosaic syllables, for these are not in it at all, but into metrical syllables and feet: Thus,

Nootàlm-onàllt-aidoùghr-ăplànt-Ĭpàll. Or, in the following,

ĕtnol-imbòst-ětnòov-eepùnch-inhòll,

of which we may imagine the following prosaic order,

Etnolìmbos tetnoovee punchìnholl,

which has as much meaning to the ear as a Greek hexameter to a tyro at the University, and illustrates as well the theory of metrical divisions.

Let us now, in the light of nature and experience, dissect a few lines of the blank verse of Sophocles, and observe, apart from all the rules of the scholiasts and metrical critics, in what particulars they differ from our own. It is unnecessary, then, to premise the least knowledge of the Greek, for the question now is of metre and the ear, and not of meaning or the mind.

These lines, from the blank verse of the Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, are drama, of the blank verse of Sophocles examples of the heroic verse of that generally. They prove that metre, like musical harmony, is an affair of the senses merely, and not of any ingenious predetermination by rule.

divisions, or feet; and of the syllables, five are short in quantity. The distribution of the short syllables is not the same in all ; for in the first example the spondaic foot is the third, in the next it is the fourth, in the next, third, in the next, fifth, in order. Thus it is perceived, that the necessary variety is given to this verse, by varying the position of the one spondaic foot.

In each of the lines we observe six

Again, in the last example given, a new arrangement appears, namely, the putting of two short syllables in the fourth foot of the verse, and inserting two spondaie

which read,

Polinm-ěnèik--aimeebl-epeisphr-oneisd

ŏmos.

Another,

Rusai dè pau mìasmà ton tèthneekòtos; which read,

filled out with the requisite quantity of sounds, and a greater variety introduced. In a word, the lines have all the same quality, or metrical duration, as in bars of music, but the short syllables are variously distributed.

Another,

Rusai seauton kai polin rusai d'emee;

which read,

Rusais--ěautonkaip-olinr-ŭsaid-ěmee.

Another,

iambic form be always preserved. Thus in the last example given, there are seven instead of five short metrical syllables, arranged thus,

giving but five feet, when the usual number is six; but in all cases preserving the iambic metrical accents. Not to dwell