And the man will come along with the wagon,
And he'll empty her into the wagon,

And he'll drive her down to the dock,

And he 'll dump her into the river,
And she 'll go floating down the river
Without any head and without any legs —
And I did n't want her to die!
My dolly, my dolly, my dolly,
Is dead and I've buried her,
And I did n't want her to die!

This childish dirge is curiously like the bold and formless lyric outpourings of savages. It is wildly rhythmic, not regular, not artificial, instinctive rather than artistic. It has even the repetition and reduplication and overt cataloging which often characterize the chants of primitive races.

Even in the less spontaneous and more consciously artistic paragraphs of the great orators, we can often feel the rise and fall of rhythm, sometimes only in a single sentence and sometimes carried through a long passage. For instance, in a speech of John Bright's delivered during the Crimean war, he said that "the angel of death has been abroad through the land: we may almost hear the beating of his wings." It would be easy to adduce other examples from the orations which are charged with sweeping emotion.

Certain of the novelists have now and again availed themselves of this same device to enhance the pathos of the situation they were setting forth. Dickens, in particular, could rarely resist the temptation to drop into very obvious rhythm whenever he stood by the death-bed or the tomb of one of his characters. Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph of “Nicholas Nickleby": "The grass was green above the dead

boy's grave, trodden by feet so small and light, that not a daisy drooped its head beneath their pressure. Through all the spring and summer-time garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands, rested upon the stone."

In general, prose is for daily use in this workaday world; and it becomes rhythmic when it has to express emotion, that is to say, only on special occasions. But even when it is properly rhythmic we do not like to have it encroach on the borders of actual verse. We feel that prose is one thing and that verse is another; and therefore a delicate ear is annoyed by the excessive regularity of the rhythm in Dickens's elegies. It is a little too obvious, and it offends us as out of place in prose. The fundamental difference between the rhythms appropriate to prose and those appropriate to verse lies in the fact that the latter conform to a simple pattern and that the former do not. If a writer of prose forces us to perceive his pattern by limiting it, as Dickens does, he loses the ample freedom proper to prose, and he suffers this loss without achieving the special merit of verse. In prose, our ear delights in the vague suggestion of a pattern, which is too large for us to grasp, even though we take pleasure in it. In verse, the poet spreads the pattern before us, invites our attention to it; he awakes in us the expectancy that its elements will recur at regular intervals; and it is partly by the gratification of this expectancy that he gives us pleasure. This pattern is the result of reducing rhythm to measure; and it is this metrical rhythm which the writer of prose must avoid unless he is willing to annoy our ears. The orator and the novelist may deal with the same subject-matter as the

poet, but they must not infringe on his method. Their diction may be as impassioned as his, as lofty in phrasing, as elevated in imagination; but they must avoid that formal regularity which we hold to be the privilege of the poet alone.

This formal regularity is what constitutes English verse; and it is easy to analyze. When we read a line of English poetry we cannot help noticing that certain syllables are bolder or longer or more emphatic than others. In Longfellow's

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

these more important syllables are the first of every pair; and in Drake's

When Freedom from her mountain height,

they are the second in every pair. We may indicate the rise and fall of these syllables in Longfellow's line by suggesting that it more or less resembles

Tumty, tumty, tumty, tumty,

while in Drake's line it is

In Byron's line

Titum, titum, titum, titum.

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, the more important syllables are the third in each group of three; and the scheme of the line is

Tititum, tititum, tititum, tititum.

If we read as one line Hood's

Make no deep scrutiny into her mutiny,

the important syllables are the first in each group of three; and the scheme is

Tumtity, tumtity, tumtity, tumtity.

That these syllables have an importance superior to the other syllables in the same lines is undeniable. This importance may be due to the fact that they are either more emphatic or longer in time of utterance. But are these differences in tone or in accent the only difference between them? Here we enter on one of the most disputed questions in versification. The more important syllables may differ in length, in the time we take to utter them, that is to say, in quantity. They may differ also in emphasis, in stress, that is to say, in accent. They may differ further in pitch, in their melodic tone. Or the difference may sometimes be due to a combination of time, stress and pitch, for a syllable may be at once longer than the syllables which precede and follow, while it is also more sharply accented, as well as higher in pitch. We may be in doubt as to the cause of the superior importance of these syllables, but we never deny the fact that for some reason they are more important. And this superior importance of certain syllables over other syllables in the same line, whatever its cause may be, is the basis of English versification. There is no profit in here entering on the discussion as to the cause of this superior importance; and hereafter in this book these syllables of superior importance will be called long, even though they may owe their value to other elements than mere duration of time. In like manner, the syllables of inferior importance will be called short, even though they may contain long vowels. And for the sake of convenience a long syllable will be marked or indicated by the sign - and a short syllable by the sign

If now we substitute these signs for tumty and

tumtity, we find that Longfellow's line "Tell me not, in mournful numbers," may be represented thus:

Drake's "When Freedom from her mountain height will be translated into these symbols:

Byron's "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea" has this scheme:

And Hood's "Make no deep scrutiny into her mutiny" has this:

531

Thus we see that each of these lines is made by the fourfold repetition of the same unit. Each of these units we call a foot. In Longfellow's line this unit is ~, a long followed by a short; and by tradition this foot is called a trochee. In Drake's line the unit is a short followed by a long; and this foot is called an iamb or iambus. In Byron's line the unit is -, two shorts followed by a long; and the name of this foot is anapest. In Hood's line the unit is ~~, a long followed by two shorts, a foot which is known as a dactyl. These terms, trochee, iamb, anapest, and dactyl, have been taken over from Latin versification, although they there represent feet not really corresponding to the English feet which bear the same names. These four are probably the only feet possible in English versification, because in English, which is a strongly accented language, we seem to be unable to utter three syllables in succession without making one