or the hackneyed lines, from Pope's Essay on Criticism, about Ajax and swift Camilla. In that same poem, we are told that "the sound should seem an echo to the sense." This is true in general terms. But a per

petual imitative jingle would reduce poetry to the functions and virtues of a parrot. The suggestion, the hint, must lurk in the background, as is the case with all the great poets. Shakspere rarely used direct imitation; an instance is the "Double, double," etc., of the witches as they stir their boiling caldron. But some writers go so far as to insist that every isolated sound has a special suggestion and meaning. Somebody has fancied that he hears a rubbing or boring in the sound tr; and so on, to the wildest nonsense. As Professor Whitney says, there is "no natural and inherent significance of articulate sounds." Of course, he would not deny direct imitations of natural sounds; nor would he exclude from certain combinations the quality of 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant,' 'sweet' or 'harsh.' It is the combinations of sounds that give the peculiar quality Thus, combinations of liquids suggest har

to a verse.

mony, beauty

"Morn, in the white wake of the morning star,

Came furrowing all the orient into gold."-Tennyson.

"stars.

May drop their golden tears upon the ground."

- George Peele.

Sounds difficult to utter give a harsh effect to verse: note the combinations of consonants in Milton's famous line from Lycidas: "Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw." Even liquid consonants may be rough when combined, as in this verse, or in the "grate harsh

thunder" quoted above, with sounds which are hard to utter. A crowding of light syllables may be combined with this harshness:

"So he with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on, with difficulty and labour he."

-Par. Lost, 2. 1021.

The combination of sounds in a verse is a matter for which no definite rule can be given. It is not even possible to say, as we can say of rime, that this is good or that bad. "Solvitur ambulando." Here lies the skill, the genius of the poet; and no rules can take the place of a poetic ear. The poet combines sounds with forcible or melodious effect, just as the composer puts together his various notes. The "cadence" of poetry

such a quality as in Spenser Mr. Arnold calls "fluidity" of verse—is easier to feel than to explain. Let us take two stanzas, each in precisely the same metre, but differing in cadence as a jog-trot differs from the pace of an Arabian charger. Cristofer Tye, in his metrical version of the Acts of the Apostles, says:

"It chaunced in Iconium,

As they ofttimes did use,
Together they into did come
The sinagoge of Jewes."

Shelley, Chorus in Hellas:

"Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendor of its prime."

Even after allowing for the difference in the subject, and in the associations called up by each, even after

setting aside any advantage one may have over the other in style, there still remains a something whose presence in the versification of the second extract makes poetry, whose absence reduces the first to a dull jingle.

§ 8. SLURRING AND ELIDING.

Slurring is a term used by writers on metre to denote the rapid pronunciation of certain light syllables, and is commonly applied whenever we have two light syllables to the stress in a regular metre which has normally one light syllable to each stress-syllable. Thus Chaucer :

"Of Éngelónd, to Cáunterbúry they wénde;"

or Milton:

"No ánger find in thée but píty and rúth.”

Here we do not suppress the syllables, we simply hurry over them, pronounce them rapidly; and the poet is therefore careful to use for such a purpose those words alone which allow of a rapid pronunciation. Slurring is a common license in poetry, and must be distinguished from contraction, where a syllable is totally suppressed: e.g., in our familiar I'll for I will, or in many Shaksperian words, to be noted below.

Elision is where the final (sounded) vowel of one word is so combined with the initial vowel of the following word that the effect is to make a single syllable of the two. We shall note this license more particularly in speaking of Chaucer's metres : it is common enough

in such cases as Milton's "the infernal doors" infernal; and in his

"Hurl'd headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,"

when there is also a case of slurring in ethereal. It is, perhaps, possible to substitute in these cases for elision a very rapid slurring. Where elision does not take place, we have Hiatus.

§ I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

HAVING Considered the elements which make up our versification, it remains to treat English Metres themselves. The task is not easy. There is an infinite amount of contradiction about the very foundations of our verse. Mr. Ruskin asserts that stress "may be considered as identical with quantity" (preface to his Eng. Prosody). Mr. Henry Sweet, while granting that accent tends to lengthen a short syllable, and lack of accent tends to shorten a long syllable, says emphatically that quantity can not "be identified with stress." The union of quantity and accent is only a tendency; and Schipper's statement (quoted on p. 138) may be accepted as true. In all cases, we should base a metrical rule on observed facts; not, as the late Mr. Lanier did in his Science of English Verse, force a theory on all possible facts, whether carefully analyzed and tested, or not. Thus, there is much justice in Mr. Ruskin's statement that "the measures of verse have for second and more important function that of assisting and in part compelling clearness of utterance, thus enforcing with noble emphasis, noble words, and making them, by their audible symmetry, not only emphatic but memorable"; but it is only a statement, an observation, -nothing upon which we may found any rule. The