stressed positions must not be occupied by weakly stressed words, nor can strongly stressed words occupy the unstressed positions. Anapaestic verse is, therefore, less capable of variety than iambic; cp. Lewis, Prin. p. 111 ff. Thus the only variation is the inclusion of iambs amongst the anapaests.

The four-foot verse is the commonest anapaestic form, especially in lyrics, e.g. in some of T. Moore's Irish Melodies:

Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid;

Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed, As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head, or in Shelley's Sensitive Plant:

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, And closed them beneath the kisses of Night; mixed with three-foot verses in C. Wolfe's Burial of Sir John Moore:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corpse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O'er the grave where our hero we buried. Cowper's Alexander Selkirk consists of anapaestic verses of three feet:

I am monarch of all I survey;

My right there is none to dispute;

From the centre all round to the sea

I am lord of the fowl and the brute etc.

W. Scotts Coronach has two feet:

He is gone on the mountain,

He is lost to the forest,

Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest.
The font reappearing

From the raindrops shall borrow,
But to us comes no cheering,

To Duncan no morrow!

also Shelley's Ode The Cloud:

I bring fresh showers
For the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade

For the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

But the other tail-rime lines have three feet; cp. Kroder, Shelleys Verskunst, Erlangen 1903, p. 163. Swinburne uses longer anapaestic verses of five to eight feet; cp.:

The sea is at ebb, | and the sound of her utmost word | Is soft as the least wave's lapse in a still small reach etc. (The Seabard. Poet. Works VI, 5.)

The sea is awake, | and the sound of the song | of the joy | of her walking is rolled |

From afar to the star that recedes, from anear to the wastes of the wild wide shore.

(In the Water. Poet. Works Vl, 18.)

Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight, | The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight.

(March: An Ode. Poet. Works III, 169.)

This eight-foot anapaestic verse, which has 23 syllables, is - apart from Whitman's 'verses' (§ 225) the longest English verse.

§ 223. Dactylic Verse.

Dactylic rhythm is closely related to anapaestic rhythm, since within the verse the beats are in each case separated by two unstressed syllables, which can sometimes be represented by one syllable. Dactylic verses begin with a stressed syllable and end with one or two unstressed syllables. Sometimes we find in verses of a decided dactylic rhythm initial unstressed syllables and masculine endings.

Dactylic verses, apart from hexameters (§ 224) are rarer than anapaestic, and first occur in the nineteenth century. Hood's The Bridge of Sighs consists of two-foot dactylic verses with gliding, feminine or masculine endings; e.g.

So too Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade:

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'

Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,

Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Longfellow's translation of Ännchen von Tharau is written in dactylic verse of four feet with masculine endings like that of the original:

Annie of Tharaw, my true love of old,

She is my life, and my goods, and my gold.

Annie of Tharaw, her heart once again
To me has surrendered in joy and in pain.

Annie of Tharaw, my riches, my good,

Thou, O my soul, my flesh, and my blood etc. Swinburne, who is fond of long verses, has also written dactylic verses with five to eight feet: Years upon years, as a course of clouds that | thicken Thronging the ways of the wind that shifts and veers, Pass, and the flames of remembered fires requicken

Years upon years. England, | queen of the

(Poet. Works V, 119.)

waves whose | green in violate | girdle en rings thee | round,

Mother fair as the morning, where is now the place of thy foemen found?

Still the sea that salutes us free proclaims them stricken, acclaims thee crowned. (III, 208.)

Longfellow (Golden Legend IV) also has eightfoot dactylic verse with feminine or masculine endings:

Onward and onward the | highway | runs to the distant | city, impatiently | bearing |

Tidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring! . . .

Sweet is the air with the budding haws, and the valley stretching for miles below

Is white with blossoming cherry-trees, as if just covered with lightest snow.

$224. The Hexameter.

Of all dactylic verses the most common is the hexameter, which must therefore be discussed separately. The first, although incomplete, description of the development of the English hexameter is found in Elze's Der englische Hexameter, Dessau 1867. Sieper added to this in his edition. of Longfellow's Evangeline, Heidelberg 1905. Mc Kerrow, The Use of so-called Classical Metres in Elizabethan Verse (Mod. Lang. Quart. IV, 172 ff., V, 6ff.) also discusses the hexameter. Wölk, Geschichte und Kritik des engl. Hexameters (Normannia, Band 3, Berlin 1909), gives as complete a chronological survey as possible of English translations and original poems in quantitative and accented hexameters. He further discusses all questions concerning the structure of English hexameters.

In the sixteenth century an attempt was made in England to imitate classical quantitative hexameters. But since English has no such sharp distinctions of quantity as Latin and Greek (§ 205), and the real essence of quantity was not understood in the sixteenth century, and it was thought that a syllable could according to whim be looked on as long or short (cp. Wölk p. 13f.), these attempts