that metrical feet have other acoustic relations than that of stresses equally placed in time. Each foot is made up of syllables in which the vowel sounds are musical notes, produced by a musical instrument, the human organ of speech. The combinations of these sounds in the line are harmonious if the order in which they follow accords with their acoustic relations to each other, - relations far more delicate than the exact vibratory equivalents of musical pitch, though based on the same physical law. The consonants, too, which open or close the vowel sounds of words vary greatly in musical quality and can be arranged in sequences which are pleasing or the reverse, the most obvious. arrangement being alliteration or the linking together of words beginning with the same consonant. Internal alliteration or bringing together syllables of related consonant sounds is more delicate and artistic. It is these melodic sequences of sound which give the poetic line vigor, life, and indefinable significance, and to impart to it these qualities is the essence of artistry. As the notes in human speech are very numerous, each of our written vowels representing from three to nine sounds, the possible modulated combinations of ten syllables are countless even if restricted to those which have intelligible meaning. The poet is endowed with the power of instinctively selecting those which are melodious, and this power is an intimate quality of his nature. This skill is inborn and rare;

there lies deep in the man a sympathy with melodious sound combinations, and his words assume them readily. To other men who have not the power of creating them they give almost as much pleasure as they do to him. If this power is united with intellectual ability and keen perception of the emotional suggestiveness of things, we have a poet of the higher rank.

The tone-color sense is like the color sense which constitutes the irreducible charm of some painters. It is a transcendental technic which cannot be brought within a set of scientific categories. We know that some words flow together and some do not. For instance, the name "phonetic syzygy that has been invented for this poetic element is as cacophonous a combination as can be imagined, whereas the compound "tone-color" is in itself agreeable. The complicated music of a poetic phrase can be illustrated by few examples. As far as possible different vowel combinations have been selected and alliteration has been avoided:

Good night, sweet prince;

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

SHAKESPEARE.

O delight of the headlands and beaches.

SWINBURNE.

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

- MARLOWE.

Envy and calumny and hate and pain. - SHELLEY. Ah! What a sound will rise, how wild and dreary. LONGFELLOW.

It will be observed that in most of the above lines there is one key word which if changed takes with it the beauty of the phrase. If in the first one, for instance, we substitute "spirits" for "angels," we lose the modulation between the first and second groups of vowels made by the successive ng sounds in "angels" and "sing." The following combinations have no music in them, though in all the accents are correctly arranged:

The babe, she thought, would surely bring him back. His crime complete, scarce knowing what he did. Brief time had Conrad now to greet Gulnare.

She clasps a babe to whom her breast brings no relief. - BYRON.

Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Sir Cardinal. SHELLEY.

Wide smiling skies shine bright.

The melodic combinations of words should be continually varied, not to avoid monotony, though nothing is more tiresome than continual recurrence of similar cadences, but because they express emotion which rises and falls as different images

are presented to the mind. Even harsh collocations are sometimes emphatic and rhetorical and are effective in dramatic situations when passion is broken and inarticulate. But every feeling in the ordinary range of experience, every emotion which is related to the beauty and order and pathos of life, is reflected in some of the unobtrusive forms of verbal music, and we rank a poet as artist largely by his power to link words so that the sound suggests unformulated thought. Among the poets whose lines are marked by refined melodic assonances are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, Poe, Longfellow, and others of less note. The music of each is individual like the tones of the voice.

All are

musical, though they vary widely in emotional range and interpretative insight.

The Rhythm or Movement of the Line

The sequence of stressed syllables or the rhythm of the line is another musical element hardly less important though less delicate than the "concourse of sweet sounds" of which we have spoken. The rhythm depends on the position and emphasis of the accented syllables and the number of unaccented syllables between them; that is to say, on the scansion of the line. This is usually to be detected by the opening and ending words, but it may sometimes be necessary to glance over two or three lines before we perceive the norm or con

trolling scansion if it is at all novel or intricate. In ordinary blank verse or the heroic couplet the scheme discloses itself at a glance, but in meters where variety is allowed it is not so easy, and an "ear for verse" or considerable practice in reading verse is necessary to determine where the lines of division between the feet should be placed. Methodical scansion is fortunately not necessary to intelligent reading or enjoyment of verse, and usually a reader hits on the norm or general scheme instinctively. The prevailing foot gives the rhythmical movement of the line and influences its expressiveness. Coleridge was one of the first to notice that the number of accents and not the number of syllables was the important matter in English verse, and that lines composed of different feet correspond to different phases of emotion. In the introduction to Christabel, in which anapests, dactyls, and two-syllable feet are all used with an instinctive recognition of fitness, he says:

"The meter' of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from being founded on a new principle, namely that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, the occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.”