The cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorious, as evening mist
Ris'n from a river o'er the marish glides,
And gathers round fast at the laborer's heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced

The brandished sword of God before them blazed.

-Par. Lost, 12: Milton.

Here, again, notice the unimportance and rapidity expressed in the italicized words:

Each creek and bay

With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals
Of fish that with their fins and shining scales
Glide under the green wave.

-Idem, 7.

Notice in the following, too, how, in the lines beginning with A league of grass, Tennyson, by lengthening the unaccented syllables in washed, broad, Waves, and creeps, retards the movement of his verse to make it represent the slow flowing of the water:

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, looms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And sitting, muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream,
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,

Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crowned with the minster-towers.

-The Gardener's Daughter.

Slowness, in the instances already mentioned, has been produced mainly by long vowel-sounds. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth lines of the following quotation, all of

which is to the point here, it is produced by consonant. sounds combined so as to be difficult to pronounce:

Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,

And the smooth strain in smoother numbers flows.
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors and the words move slow;
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er the bending corn, and skims along the plain.
-Essay on Criticism: Pope.

It has been intimated that in poetry there is, besides an absolute, a relative quantity of syllables. This latter depends upon the places in the verse where the accent fallsi. e., upon the measure, which itself, as has been said, results from the combined effects of the tendencies, already considered, to movement and to rest, or to fast and slow time. Just as intelligence measures off phrases and words to represent their relative importance, so psychic emotion, or the artistic feeling within us which regulates our constructive method, seems to take satisfaction in making their accents conform to what in a subtle way, perhaps, it recognizes to be representative of the regularities of life, -regularities, which-to say nothing about those which are external to him-every living man experiences in the recurring tread of his feet when walking, in the heaving of his chest when breathing, in the beating of his heart, and even in the vibrating of his nerves when receiving or imparting impressions. But whatever may be the cause or character of these regular arrangements, which will be unfolded more fully under the head of force, they exist, and have an important bearing on those measurements of ideas which we have been considering.

When we are reading verse, the accented syllables seem

to be used at regular intervals; that is to say, about the same amount of time is expected to intervene between these syllables, no matter by how many unaccented ones they may be separated. Hence, as a rule, the more unaccented syllables there are in a line, or-what is the same thing-in a measure, the more rapidly is it uttered. Each of the four following lines, for instance, is read in nearly the same time. Yet the first contains only seven syllables, and the last eleven. Of course, these latter, in order to be uttered in the same time as the preceding seven, must be read more rapidly.

She had dreams all yester night

Of her own betrothed knight,

And she in the midnight wood will pray
For the weal of her lover that 's far away.

-Christabel: Coleridge.

Rapid movement represents, as has been indicated, what is comparatively unimportant, light, or trivial in its character. Notice, therefore, the inappropriateness of the metre used to express the thought in the following:

My soul is beset

With grief and dismay;

I owe a vast debt,

And nothing can pay.

I must go to prison,

Unless the dear Lord,

Who died and is risen,

His mercy afford.

-Guest's History of English Rhythms.

Especially, as contrasted with the following expression of

the same thought:

My former hopes are fled,

My terror now begins ;

I feel alas! that I am dead

In trespasses and sins.

-Idem.

For the reasons given, metres in which the accented syllables are fewer than the unaccented ones, are favorites with those who wish to describe events or scenes characterized by rapidity of movement,-in such poems, for instance, as Scott's Lochinvar :

Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,

Through all the wide border his steed was the best.

or Read's Sheridan's Ride, e. g.:

Up from the South at break of day,

Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,

or Browning's How They Brought the Good News from Ghent, a poem, which, with its galloping measures, is probably the best phonetic representation of a horseback ride in the language, equally true to the requirements of discoursive and of dramatic elocution:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three ;

"Good speed!" cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew ;
"Speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through.

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,

And into the midnight we galloped abreast.

A metre similar in effect to those just mentioned is the classic hexameter, used by Homer and Virgil. In most of the English imitations of this metre, however, the easy flow of the movement, which, as readers of Greek and Latin know, is its chief characteristic, fails to be produced. One reason for this is that our language, largely because it lacks the grammatical terminations of the classic tongues, contains fewer short syllables then they; and, in the place of the only foot of three syllables allowed

in their hexameter-I mean the dactyl, containing one long and two short syllables, our poets often use long syllables only, influenced to do this, probably, by the false theory that quantity has nothing to do with English metres. Another reason is, that notwithstanding the poverty of our language in short syllables, many seem to think that the hexameter necessarily requires a large number of them. But Greek and Latin lines are frequent in which measures containing short syllables are few, e. g.:

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ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον εταίρων.—Homer.

-1- -1

Illi inter sese magna vi brachia tollunt.-Virgil.

Both of these causes serve to make our English hexameters slow and heavy. Besides this, most of those who write them, misled by the notion that they must crowd as many syllables as possible into their lines, are tempted to use too many words, and thus to violate another principle not of poetry only, but of rhetoric. Take the following, for instance, from Longfellow's Children of the Lord's Supper:

Weeping he spake in these words: and now at the beck of the old man,
Knee against knee, they knitted a wreath round the altar's enclosure.
Kneeling he read then the prayers of the consecration, and softly,
With him the children read; at the close, with tremulous accents,
Asked he the peace of heaven, a benediction upon them.

An English verse representing accurately-what is all that is worth representing—the movement of the classic hexameter, would read more like this, which, itself, too, would read better, did it contain fewer dactyls; but to show the possibilities of our verse these have been intentionally crowded into it :