The second line of the following couplet, from Browning's How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, exemplifies how an extra initial syllable may change the movement from amphibrach to anapestic :·

"And all I remember | is friends flocking round |
1

As I sat | with his head | 'twixt mỹ knees | on the ground."

7. The AMPHIMACER (Greek ȧupí and μakpós, long on both sides), is a long, a short, and a long (_~ _), as in the word undismayed. It is seldom used in English verse except as an occasional intermediate foot.

NOTE. The convenience of being familiar with these last two kinds of foot will be especially apparent when we come to note the rhythm of the phrase, and the rhythm of prose, wherein a much greater variety of measure prevails. See below, p. 213.

II.

The Metrical Clause: the Verse. - Corresponding in rhythm to the clause or sentence-member in grammar is the grouping of metrical feet which makes up the verse or line; which latter accordingly receives a technical name from the number of feet it contains. Thus a verse one foot long is monometer; two feet, dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter.

These clusters of feet, it will be remembered, are metrical clauses, not grammatical; they may or may not correspond to pauses in the sense; indeed, it is essential that the two be kept independent in movement. This is made especially imperative by the fact that where lines are rhymed the rhyme itself constitutes a metrical punctuation, emphasizing the bounds of the clause; if now for any length the attempt is made to end every line with a sense-pause, the result is monotony and dulness. The ideal of the two kinds of clausal structure is that while the foot and line exist as a constant pattern, the grainmatical flow of the sentence shall course in and out, limpid, spontaneous, free.

NOTE. - A verse and a line are the same thing, and the two names are practically interchangeable. If we used them strictly, we should regard the terms as naming the object from different points of view. As a group of feet making up a metrical clause, it is a verse; from its derivation it means the turning, that is, of the written or chanted current; and as such is antithetic to pro[r]sa, straightforward; see above, p. 108. As a constituent part of a stanza, or as a row of words not considered rhythmically, it is called a line. Of the two, the term verse is the more technical.

The use of the term verse as equivalent to stanza (as verse of a hymn), as also the use of it to designate a prose paragraph (except in the Bible), should be avoided as provincial.

Some Standard Types of Verse. As the above-given names of the metres explain themselves, and as the kinds can be recognized by the easy process of counting feet, there is no need of more detailed description here, further than to mention the few that are so much more prevalent or celebrated than the rest as to require ready acquaintance.

12

The most prevalent it may be regarded as the standard English line for serious poetry is the IAMBIC PENTAMETER, of which the formula is |~|~_|~_|~_|~-|· This is the measure of Heroic Verse,1 like Pope's translation of the Iliad; of Elegiac Verse, like Gray's Elegy; and of Epic and Dramatic Blank Verse. In all these except the dramatic the pentameter scheme is observed with much strictness; in verse of dramatic type, however, where the freedom of oral speech is an appreciable influence, the verse is frequently limbered by an extra short syllable at the end.

EXAMPLE. -1. Modern epic blank verse may be exemplified from one of the noblest works in that measure, Tennyson's Holy Grail :

"And all at once, as there we sat, we heard

A cracking and a riving of the roofs,
And rending, and a blast, and overhead
Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry.

1 Some use the term heroic to cover all iambic pentameter, blank verse with the rest; here, in order to make a more clearly articulated classification, it is confined to the rhymed heroics of the Pope and Dryden type.

And in the blast there smote along the hall

A beam of light seven times more clear than day:
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail

All over cover'd with a luminous cloud,

And none might see who bare it, and it past." 1

2. The extra syllable of dramatic verse may be exemplified from Shakes peare's Henry VIII.

"He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading:
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not,

But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.

And though he were unsatisfied in getting,

Which was a sin, yet in bestowing, madam,

He was most princely." 2

In this passage every line but one has the extra syllable; it should be said, however, that in this particular play the liberty is used beyond the common.

Next to this in prevalence, for long poems, is the IAMBIC TETRAMETER - | ) ; a favorite vehicle with the older poets, from Herrick to Swift, for moralizing and meditative verse; adopted also for satire, by Butler in his Hudibras. It is a comparatively easy measure where the poetic feeling is only moderately intense; hence much used for the occasional verse of prose writers.

It has more lightness, though a less dignified sweep, than the pentameter; and it was for these qualities that, relieved by an occasional verse in trimeter, it was adopted by Scott for his narrative romantic poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and the Lady of the Lake.

The iambic tetrameter, alternated with trimeter, is the socalled BALLAD MEASURE. Sometimes the two alternating lines are printed in one, making a line fourteen syllables long, technically called a fourteener. This is the measure of Chapman's

translation of Homer.

1 TENNYSON, The Holy Grail, 11. 182-190.

2 SHAKESPEARE, Henry VIII, Act iv, Scene 2.

EXAMPLES. The following, from Butler's Hudibras, will illustrate the old writers' use of iambic tetrameter :

"He that is valiant and dares fight,

Though drubbed, can lose no honour by 't.
Honour's a lease for lives to come,

And cannot be extended from
The legal tenant: 'Tis a chattel
Not to be forfeited in battle.
If he that in the field is slain
Be in the bed of honour lain,
He that is beaten may be said

To lie in honour's truckle-bed."

The following, from Scott's Lady of the Lake, will illustrate its use for narrative:

"With that he shook the gather'd heath,

And spread his plaid upon the wreath;
And the brave foemen, side by side,
Lay peaceful down like brothers tried,
And slept until the dawning beam

Purpled the mountain and the stream."

The following, from Chevy-Chace, will illustrate the ballad measure, as put in stanza : —

"God prosper long our noble king,

Our lives and safetyes all;

A woeful hunting once there did

In Chevy-Chace befall.

To drive the deere with hound and horne,

Erle Percy took his way;

The child may rue that is unborne,

The hunting of that day."

The following, from Chapman's Iliad, will illustrate the movement of fourteeners: —

"He said; and such a murmur rose, as on a lofty shore

The waves make, when the south wind comes, and tumbles them before
Against a rock, grown near the strand which diversely beset

Is never free, but, here and there, with varied uproars beat."

In trochaic metre the tetrameter has gained celebrity as the measure of Longfellow's Hiawatha. It is not well adapted, however, for serious work; the fatal ease with which it may

be reeled off, also, precludes its artistic repute. Its use in the case of Hiawatha was probably intended as a suggestion of crude aboriginal rhythm. A much more frequent use of it is the stanza form technically called 8s and 7s, in which the alternate lines are one syllable short. Tennyson, in his Locksley Hall, has reduced this stanza to a couplet, each line fifteen syllables long; the pause generally after the fourth foot, but with liberty to vary.

EXAMPLES. -1. Longfellow's Hiawatha is the most prominent, almost the only example, of pure trochaic tetrameter in serious verse: —

"Out of childhood into manhood

Now had grown my Hiawatha,
Skilled in all the craft of hunters,
Learned in all the lore of old men,
In all youthful sports and pastimes,
In all manly arts and labors."

The following will illustrate its capacity for parody:

"But he left them in a hurry,

Left them in a mighty hurry,
Stating that he would not stand it,

Stating in emphatic language

What he'd be before he 'd stand it."1

2. The following couplet from Locksley Hall will illustrate, in the first line, the liberty of variation of pause obtained by printing this measure as 15s:

"Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the west."

To print the first four feet as a line, separating noun and adjective, would here be intolerable.

Of hexameter measure two kinds may be mentioned, not so much from their frequency as from their celebrity.

The ALEXANDRINE verse is an iambic line six feet long, with the cæsural pause 2 after the third foot (| ~_|~_|~ _ ||

1 LEWIS CARROLL, Hiawatha's Photographing.

2 For the cæsural pause, see below, p. 202.