*

Thomas Hobbes, though with a better intention, laid himself open, on a like ground, to refutation and censure, I may hope to be excused crossing over, from the other side, the border-line between scholarship and science, and for submitting, with a less ambitious aim and in a much more humble frame of mind, some of my long-forgotten (d'outre-tombe) transgressions in verse and rhythmical speculations to the inspection of my hoped-for private-circle century of indulgent readers.†

As I shall most probably never take up pen again on the subject of Verse, I may as well embrace this opportunity of making a brief profession of faith concerning modern Metric and what are termed accentual feet. I am satisfied, then, that on this subject Edgar Poe is perfectly right in the principles laid down by him in his 'Rationale of Versification,' that the substratum

* Chronology, leading straight to Astronomy, I presume was Vieta's crossing-point: Synectic, which leads down from the Alps of Cauchy and Riemann to the flowery plains of Milton and Byron, my own.

When the above was set up in print it was my intention only to publish 100 copies for private distribution, and I might have persisted in this intention had I not felt that the remarks I have passed on the labours of others rendered it imperative upon me to face the consequences of the public avowal of my opinions.

He ought to have called it 'Rationale of Metre.' Rhythm, used in its most general sense to signify the purely technical part, one of the three main heads of versification, itself subdivides again into three branches-synectic, chromatic, and metric, the latter including accent, quantity, and suspension; which last again subdivides into the theories of rests, stops, and pauses. Metric guards the ear, Synectic satisfies, Chromatic charms it. The first ensures correctness, the second organization, the last beauty and embellishment. For the benefit of my non-mathematical readers, I may state that 'Synectique' is a word used,

of measure is time; that an accented syllable is a long syllable, and that an unaccented syllable is a short one of varying degrees of duration, and that feet in modern metre are of equal length. Professor Newman is of an opposite opinion, and goes the length of saying, that accent is so far from lengthening that it even tends to shorten syllables, instancing the first syllable in female as shortened by the accent, and of course implying that it is shorter in female than it would be in femále to argue against such an assertion (which I think no one who is not time-deaf will be found to concur with) would be like reasoning upon colours with one who is born colour-blind.*

and I believe for the first time, by Cauchy in his Theory of Functions, the true and very insufficiently acknowledged foundation and origin of Rieman's great doctrine of Continuity, in like manner as the Triads of Kant appear to me to contain the germ (impossible to have escaped ulterior development) of the method of Hegel; or, as I am told, Turner had not existed but for Claude. At the opposite pole to Rhythm, as previously observed, we have the Idealistic of Verse, which has its continuity and discontinuity branches (the analogues of Synectic and Metric, to attempt to go into any analysis of which here would lead me too far), intermediate to which lies Imagery, the analogue of Chromatic. Ex. gr. Construction, Deduction, Development, Action, and Invention, will belong to the continuity branch; Distribution, Transition, Contrast, Light and Shade, Quantification, &c. to the discontinuity one. Between Rhythm

and Idealistic, as also already noticed, lies Expression (sense clothed in sound). At the base of and giving nourishment to our poetical plant, lies Emotion, at once the root and crown of lyric verse.

If it be true, as Professor Newman alleges, that an English voice cannot dwell on accented syllables without seeming to drawl,' it must be because of the difficulty of getting over the accented syllable in right time, in consequence of the tendency to be over delayed by giving effect to the accent.

But in reckoning the length of feet, attention must be paid to the time expended in preparing and closing, as well as in actually emitting the sound, and also to the silent syllables or pauses, to which Poe has not paid sufficient attention. I believe that his theory of substitution is perfectly correct; that, to use musical nomenclature (which appears not to have been familiar to him), an iambus with us is a quaver and crotchet; a trochee, a crotchet and quaver; an anapaest, so called (when substitutable for an iambus, of which many examples will be found in my preceding Horatian version),* two semi

* It may be noticed that all the anapaests therein employed are convertible, by elision or contraction, into iambic feet. A pretty copious sprinkling of such equivocal anapaests (as I am used to call them) helps to confer lightness and dignity on octosyllabic metre, much in the same way as raised heels are said to be worn by the young ladies of the period, to give spring and distinction to their gait, and to add to their height. I have noticed that in the two first letters in the Essay on Man,' Pope in no single instance, as far as I can recollect, allows contraction to take place by elision or by two contiguous vowels in a word running into one another; every word is made to contain its maximum number of syllables. Pope, I imagine, would have rejected as incorrect such a line as

‘Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay,'

and as downright false,

'While the jolly Hours lead in propitious May.' The Rev. Mark Pattison has kindly informed me that in Pope's Satire I., in 156 lines there are 24 commencing with -, and only two cases of accent or weak syllable in any other position. I remember reading, when a child, in some common English school-book, that a trochee in iambic verse was only permitted at the beginning of a line. (By the way, why is it that we cannot conversely substitute an initial iamb for a trochee, in a trochaic line?) I have recently been told by a high authority,

quavers followed by a crotchet, and a dactyl, substituted for a trochee, a crotchet followed by two semiquavers. Poe even quotes cases (very unsatisfactory ones, in my opinion, borrowed from unknown American versifiers), where a quaver is resolved into a triplet. Such cases, however, do exist, as ex. gr. in the imaginary line, ‘And earth the o`erpowering tones rehearse;' in [ering] each syllable is a semiquaver, but in [the o'er] only the third of a quaver. I think also, that there are some lines which occur, chiefly in very modern poetry, where the principle of apocopation must be applied to the scanning, and others, where that of tempo rubato is intended or necessary to give full effect to the recital.

6

The principle of the silent syllable, or to speak more intelligibly, of the rest, removes all the anomalies or supposed imperfections of metre which Edgar Poe imagined to exist (and they are purely imaginary) in the opening lines to the Bride of Abydos.'* He has that a trochee is admissible anywhere in an English iambic line, subject to the sole condition that two trochees shall not occur in succession. I believe the safer rule to be that in general a trochee should only occur at the beginning of a line, or after a pause or close of a period, or when the second part of the foot is a monosyllable or ends a word; the ground of the exception in all these cases being the same, and involving the theory of the rest. * Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

Know ye the land of the cedar and vine,

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;

Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,

Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in her bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;

made the exceedingly interesting observation, that all these lines run into one another, and so read will be found to consist of a succession of accentual dactyls. He rightly understands (collected works, vol. ii., p. 242), that crime at the end of the fourth line, and tell at the end of all, are to be understood as what he calls 'casuras;' in plain English, each takes on two quaver rests. 'fume, Wax' in the seventh and eighth lines, he rightly regards as a spondee substituted for a dactyl, or, as I should say, two crotchets for a crotchet and two semi-quavers.

natu

But he makes a difficulty, for which there is no occasion, about the words 'twine, And,' (ll. 14, 15) which he says 'is false in point of melody,' for that 'we must force "And" into a length which it will not naturally bear.' The fact is, that twine ending a line, very rally takes after it a quaver rest, a slight pause which assists the effect, by enabling the reciter to take a short breath, so that what Poe supposes to be a spondee is virtually a dactyl. A similar remark applies to the words 'sky, In' belonging to a triad of lines, which for some unexplained reason are dropped by Poe, and also to the words' done? Oh!' which he scans as a spondee, but which is really a dactyl, 'Oh!' being a quaver preceded by a quaver rest. So in the seventh line of

Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,
In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,

And the purple of Ocean is deepest in dye;
Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,

And all, save the spirit of Man, is divine?

'Tis the clime of the East, 'tis the land of the Sun

Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
Oh! wild as the accents of lovers' farewell

Are the hearts which they bear and the tales which they tell.'