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THE ART OF MEASURING VERSES.*

To compose good verses, may be placed among the elegant accomplishments of a thoroughly educated person. If it gives but little pleasure to others, it at least gratifies ourselves, nor can we find any idleness or mischief in a proper indulgence of so happy a taste as that of the versifier. Some historians aver, that in the first ages of the world, all writings were in metre, not even excepting laws and chronicles, and that the forms of prose were an invention of later date. A habit that is natural and harmless, is certainly not ridiculous, if one uses it with discretion; not to say that it may take the place of grosser, and more exceptionable, amusements. We have no scruple, therefore, in occupying a moderate space with a few remarks on the art of making verses in our language, more especially as it is a topic seldom touched by periodical writers, and treated by the learned in such a dry and profound way, the generality of readers are never the wiser for all that has been written on the subject.

As there are no established authorities in this art, and, indeed, no acknowledged principles-every rhymster being permitted to invent his own method, and write by instinct or initation-the critic feels quite at liberty to say just what he pleases, and offer his private observations as though these were really of some moment.

The qualities of spoken words are twofold: they are both marks of ideas,-and in that usage quite arbitrary in their sound, and expressions of feeling and sensation, being in the latter function no more arbitrary or irregular than the qualities of musical sounds. The same word may be spoken in many different ways, expressing many varieties of feelings, and conditions of thought: as of pain, fear, delight, surprise, amazement

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and all these kinds of expressions may be given in rapid succession to the same word, by as many inflections of the voice; but the same word, represented by written marks, stands only for an idea, or a thing, and has no effect upon the passions or the senses.

Of no less consequence is the arrangement of words,-the order of their succession,-by which a series of emotions are made to succeed each other, and a harmony of passions created in the imagination, like a piece of music. The art of versification consists, therefore, in arranging words in such order, that when read by a full and flexible voice, they shall excite a musical movement in the sense of hearing, that shall agree in quality and effect with the melody-if we may so speak-of the train of passions and objects awakened in the mind by the order of the words themselves, as they are mere marks of ideas. As the ascending and descending scale in music, and the movements on different keys, awaken different musical emotions, as of sad, gay, uncertain, musing, boisterous, heroic; so in verse, certain movements of the sounds of words, excite corresponding emotions; and in a perfect poem, the sense and the sound act together irresistibly.

Comic poets make use of a dancing, or even a trotting and stumbling, metre, full of odd combinations of sounds; while the heroic line rolls smoothly on, or makes grand pauses, like intervals in the echoes of artillery.

In the blank verse of the drama, the thought sustains itself upon a lofty and slow moving line, but full of irregular turns and stops, to agree naturally with the rough gestures of passion. The lyrist, again, pours out passages of unbroken melody, like passionate airs. this art, as in all of those which belong to imagination, the common and merely

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* A System of English Versification, containing Rules for the stucture of different kinds of Verse; illustro trated by numerous Examples from the best Poets. By ERASTUS EVERETT, A M. New York: D. Applets Co. 200 Broadway. Philadelphia: G. S. Appleton, 148 Chestnut street. 1848.

natural is avoided, and the beauty, power, and sweetness of discourse, given apart and by itself.

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Tempora Lucifero, cadit Eurus; et humida surgunt;"

"Per me si va nella citta dolente,
Per me si va nella perduta gente,"

The composition of good verse demands, therefore, at least these two qualifications in the composer: first, the imaginative or this of Dante: power, to give an harmonious order to images and passions, in their description; and lastly, an ear for the measure, fullness, and cadences of words. At present we propose only to consider this latter qualification, and to inquire by what means a naturally good ear may be led to a finer appreciation of the musical properties of speech.

Of every species of beauty, and more especially of the beauty of sounds, continuousness is the first element; a succession of pulses of sound becomes agreeable, only when the breaks, or intervals, cease to be heard; we say then of a note, in sound, that it is musical, when the pulses cannot be distinguished by the ear. The same is true of artificially colored surfaces; they are agreeable to the eye when we see them at such a distance as not to discern the numerous particles or specks of color which compose them. The same is true also of the human voice, in the expression of tender and agreeable emotions: the words require to be spoken with a certain smoothness and even monotony, as far as possible removed from the abrupt and curt style of business, or the rude and harsh tones of hatred or contempt. In a prosaic enunciation, as in counting, or naming a variety of disconnected objects, a sensible pause is made after each word, and the voice slides up and down upon each word, as if to separate and characterize each by itself. And this separation and distinctness of parts is, perhaps, the strongest characteristic of pure prose, and is constantly aimed at by the best writers of prose. Verse on the contrary demands a kind of fusion, or running together of the words, so that a line of verse may be spoken in one effort of the voice, as a bar of music is played by one movement of the hand. The line,

"Full many a tale their music tells," slips over the lip with a pouring softness, without break or pause. So in

or Shakspeare's

"Full fathom five thy father lies,"

in the melodious lines of Milton's Lycidas or the flute-like strains of Burns, or of Theocritus, the words are melted and toned together, and the voice glides easily through the line.

These mellow lines not only characterize the best poems, but they are also the best adapted for the voice in singing; and the first line of the stanza agrees also with the first line of the musical notes. In the most perfect airs, the words and notes agree and move together. But as the lyric, or song, is the type of all poetry,-as the air which fits it, is of all music,-it is necessary to find a very perfect agreement between the two; as, for example, in the time, or duration, of each verse, agreeing with the time of the musical notes. The division of the musical air of a song into four parts of equal length, shows that the ear demands. not only continuity of sound, but that it shall be divided into portions of equal length, as into verse, staves, and stanzas. Poetry following the same law, is divided into feet and lines of equal length, succeeding each other with perfect regularity, or alternating with shorter equal lines, for the pleasure of variety.

Thus, in reading the lines,

"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures, While the landscape round it measures," &c.,

it is necessary to a perfect reading, to fill out each line with the voice to a full and equal quantity of sound, with as great care as if chanting or singing them, and this may be done best by keeping up a regular beat with the foot.

Quantity, therefore, or the division into measures of time, is a second element of verse; each line must be stuffed out with

"The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;" sounds, to a certain fullness and plum

ness, that will sustain the voice, and force | cal ear. By this kind of division a new

it to dwell upon the sounds.

"From you have I been absent in the spring
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Had put a spirit of youth in everything,
And heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with
him."

It is impossible to read these lines without feeling their fullness: they are an extreme and rare example of that quality.

When the most perfect mellowness and continuity is joined with the greatest fullness, as in the first line of the Iliad,

"Mèenin äidee Theea, Pecleèïadeō Akileeos,

Oulomenee,"

in which the most excellent musical quality of verse is perceived, it affects the ear with a sense of conjoined power and sweetness. But as the air in music is not only divided into four parts, like the stanza which it accompanies, but also into bars, or lesser equal portions of time-three, four, or more equal bars going to fill out the lines, marked by accents, and separated by pauses of imperceptible length in singing-so, the line of significant sounds, in a verse, is also marked by accents, or pulses, and divided into portions called feet. These are necessary and natural, for the very simple reason that continuity by itself is tedious; and the greatest pleasure arises from the union of continuity with variety. In the line,

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feeling is given to the words, which almost overwhelms their meaning as prose, together of the words, doubtless gives rise and the agreeable blending and running to a similar blending and melody of images and emotions in the imagination, producing a kind of music of the mind. Lines of a good quality are always filled out with a due complement of sound: such verses as are not well filled out are characterized as "lean and flashy," without body or strength. In criticising a poem, therefore, it is good to divide the lines by the ear, and observe whether the musical divisions, or feet, have the proper fullness.

And here again the law of variety, perfecting continuity, reappears, for if the feet and dull. It is necessary-either, that one, of a line are all equally full, it will be heavy two, or three of the feet, should be shorter than the others, and this, too, by a certain

fixed quantity of sound, as in the line

"Auream quisquis mediocritatem,"

which, when musically divided, reads thus, Aure--àmquisq-ùismědi-òcrit-atem,

the first and fourth musical or metrical divisions having a less quantity of sound than the second, third and fifth :-Or, that these divisions having all an equal quantity of sound, some of them should be broken up into lesser portions; just as a bar of two minims, in the air, is broken into a minim and two crotchets ; or a crotchet, in a bar of two crotchets, is broken into a crotchet and two quavers.

"Hic subitam nigro glomerari pulvere nubem," to be read thus,

Hicsubit-àmnigr-òglomer-àrip-ùlveren

ùbem,

in which the six divisions, or musical metres, are of equal length, or require an equal stress and duration of the voice in speaking or chanting, but are differently divided; some into two heavy, or long syllables, and some into three, one heavy and two light; the two light requiring no more force of voice or time in uttering, than the one long.

In this line,

"And the shore groans trembling under a fall of billows,"

This kind of verse, (the hexameter, in which the feet have all an equal quantity of sound,) is unknown in our language, either through want of cultivation, or want of capacity in the language itself. The to be read thus, pleasure of it consists greatly in the metri cal divisions so falling as to break the words in two; so that in reading we are obliged, in order to keep sense and sound together, to fuse and blend them in a line. The rules for the structure of this verse are given in treatises of Latin and Greek prosody.

Andthesh--oregroanstr--embling--underaf--all

of b-illows,

the musical divisions not only break the words, but even the syllables; which is another difficulty in our language, the consonantal sounds being so constantly employed to begin words, and to end them.

English metres are sometimes of that kind in which the feet are all equal in quantity. Thus, in the lines,

"When coldness wraps this suffering clay, Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?”

to be read,

Whencoldnesswrapsth-issuff'r-ingclay,
Ah! whith--erstraysth-immort--almind?

When it is observed that hexameter verse requires always that the metrical divisions between the first four feet in the line must divide the dissyllable words, or if they be monosyllables, group them contrarily to the prosaic divisions; and that the feet must be all equal in quantity, so as to fill out an equal time in reading, without the aid of slurring long syllables, skipping harsh ones, or filling gaps with prosaic pauses, some notion of the difficulty of composing them may be attained; and it will be understood, why all the writers of pretended English hexameters have produced only a monotonous, prosaic kind of chant, instead of musical lines. Good verse requires to be read with the natural quantities of the syllables, but to read these English hexameters you must slur here and drawl there, to help your poet through his six equal feet. It is certainly possible, with great labor, to arrange the sounds of our language ined by it. hexametrical order, but whether it ever could become a habit of the ear and mind to compose in such divisions, is doubtful, to say the least. In the lines,

"Like souls numberless called out of time to eternity's ocean,”

the hexametrical divisions and quantities may be seen by writing and spelling the syllables so as to show their real quantities; thus,

Likesoulsn-umberlessc--alledoutoft--imetoët-

ernity's-ocean,

in which the second and third feet are too heavy, having more sound than the fourth, in a natural reading; whereas, the law of the metre requires that with a full and easy reading the feet should be equal.

the verse is perceived to consist of six heavy syllables, each composed of a vowel followed by a group of consonantal sounds, the whole measured into four equal feet. The movement is what is called spondaic, a spondee being a foot of two heavy sounds. The absence of short syllables gives the line a peculiar weight and solemnity suited to the sentiment, and doubtless prompt

But the more frequent English metres are of the kind that have one, two, or three of the metrical divisions, shorter than the others; as in the following from Burns:

"Sae flaxen were her ringlets,
Her eyebrows of a darker hue,
Bewitchingly o'erarching
Twa laughing een o' bonnie blue,"

to be read thus,

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which structure leaving the verse incomplete, the voice makes a natural pause at the end of the line, just equal in length to one long time or metre, thus, |-|·

By changing the place of the short syllable the character of the verse would also be changed, as it would also be, by the addition of another long syllable, in place of the pause at the end.

The second and fourth verses, on the other hand, consist of two spondees and two iambuses, thus,

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and have an effect of their own, very dif-
ferent from that of the others. To give
these delicate metres a lean and flashy
effect, or to make them heavy and dull,
we have only to substitute short
tities where there are long ones, and vice

versa.

quan

regu

If any person who is accustomed to read verse critically, and is endowed by nature with a nice ear for quantity, well exercised in the classic metres, will read a piece of excellent verse by some master hand, he will probably find some of the lines more full and sonorous than others. On dividing these by their musical accents, as in Greek scanning, they will be found to consist of full and regular feet, spondees and iambuses, for example, alternating variously. If the poem be a classic and lar lyric, like one of Horace's odes, the alternations will be the same throughout; and every departure from the model will be observed, as injurious to the musical or lyrical quality of the poem. But if the verse be narrative or descriptive, didactic or heroic, or if it be the blank verse of epic or dramatic poetry, the places of the iambuses and spondees will be continually varied, so as to give the greatest possible variety to the verses. Take, for example, these lines of Pope :-

"So Helluo, late dictator of the feast,
e nose of hautgout and the tip of taste,
ed your wine and analysed your meat,
plain pudding deigned at home to eat,"

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and light-as in Milton it is sometimes too In Pope's poetry the line is often weak heavy-through the employment of false quantities; but it rarely or never happens, that they fall into monotony by repeating too frequently the same form of metrical becomes easy to detect the short syllables arrangement. With a little practice, it in Pope's verse, and his is perhaps the best to begin with, in cultivating the ear. A short vowel sound followed by a double consonantal sound, usually makes a long quantity; so also does a long vowel like y in beauty, before a consonant. The metrical accents, which often differ from the prosaic, mostly fall upon the heavy sounds; which must also be prolonged in reading, and never slurred or lightened, unless to help out a bad verse. In our language the groupings of the consonants furnish a great number of spondaic feet, and give the language, especially its more ancient forms, as in the verse of Milton and the prose of Lord Bacon, a grand and solemn character.

One vowel followed by another, unless the first be naturally made long in the reading, makes a short quantity, as in the old. So, also, a short vowel followed by a single short consonant, gives a short time or quantity, as in to give. variety of rules for the detection of long A great and short quantities have yet to be invented, or applied from the Greek and Latin prosody. In all languages they are of course the same, making due allowance for difference of organization; but it is as absurd to suppose that the Greeks should have a system of prosody differing in principle from our own, as that their rules of musical harmony should be different from the modern. Both result from the nature of the ear and of the organ of speech, and are consequently the same in all ages and nations.

The two elements of musical metre, namely, time and accent, both together

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