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into rhythm; or, if Messrs. Boffin and Wegg insist upon it, "drop into poetry." We once heard a public speaker, in an extemporaneous address, say: He was wit | ty by chance | when he meant to be wise, |" which is a perfect anapestic tetrameter of the books. This expression is poetry and not prose; and the occasional-even the frequent-use of such may improve the style for some subjects and enrich the composition; but such expressions do not for that reason become prose; nor need we lose sight of what prose really is as contradistinguished from poetry.

The same is true of other languages. Some painstaking gatherer has collected hexameters from the prose of Cicero, Tacitus, Suetonius, Nepos, Livius, Sallustius and Valerius Maximus ; and the same could easily be done in English, Greek, French, German, and especially in Italian and Spanish.

There are those that find interest in looking to nature below us for examples of rhythm-analogues, if not prototypes and identities in process of evolution-in the voices of the winds and the waters, in the pulsations and breathings of all animal life,

and especially in the voices of animate nature. We do not regard these as by any means idle dreamings.

These rhythm-seekers call our attention to the iambic rhythm in the cuckoo's cry of its; own name; in the Tu-whit! tu-whoo! of the whooping owl; in the kill-dee's reiteration of its piping cry; in the Po-tak! po-tak! of the guinea fowl; in the Bow-ow of the honest watch-dog; and in the Brek-ke-kex, ko-ax, koax of the frogs, and the Iô, iô, itố, itô, itô of the birds of Aristophanes. They also hear unmistakable anapests in the reverberating challenge of the whip-poor-will, which makes the beautiful valleys of Virginia echo with its wild music on moon-lit nights; in the Southern harvest-song of the partridge, which sings Bob-bob-white; and in the Kikka-bau, kik-ka-bau and the To-ro-tix, to-ro-tix of the classic birds of Aristophanes.

So much of animal language as may be properly called inarticulate is incapable of rhythm. That is properly monic—a single note-but might be called, by those who can go nowhere else save to the prosody books, pyrrhic, tribrachic, or proseleusmatic, or else

spondaic, molossian, or dispondaic, according as the syllables are weak or strong; for there is not even the suspicion of any rhythm in any of these so-called feet, for the ample reason that rhythm rests on what they have not-a relief of strong syllables with weak ones. Many piping birds continue their monotone indefinitely, some on high and rapid keys, others on low and slow ones, others on strong dispondaic cries, and yet others weak proseleusmatics; and so on to an endless variety of unvaried monotones.

Returning to human speech-articulated, as Homer seems to have called it-we find an example of remarkably rhythmical prose in Macpherson's Ossian. The aim appears to have been to write in rhythmical prose; and it is clear that if the author had succeeded in being perfectly rhythmical throughout, his production would have been poetry As it is, it is a cross between poetry and prose. We give a few sentences with the feet noted:

"Did not Os | sian hear a voice?- | or is it the sound of days that are no more? | "

This is poetry. The rhythm is almost

purely iambic; as much so as, for instance most of Longfellow. Another example :

"The blue waves of E | rin roll | in light. | The mountains are covered with day. |

Trees shake

Two green

their dusky heads in the breeze. | hills, with aged oaks, | surround | a narrow plain. "

This is less rhythmical than the first. It is more nearly iambic than anapestic; and shows no greater license than most of our leading poets sometimes use.

Our purpose is to indicate, first and mainly, what poetry is, and not what mistaken theories and theorists have tried to make it; for we are free to confess that if we were obliged to call every production designated a poem and every effusion perpetrated in the name of The Nine as legitimate verse, we should have need in their analysis for the entire lot of mechanical lumber and rubbish bequeathed us by the Greeks and Romans, and besides have to drag in occasionally a quirk or a crotchet from the Goths and the Aztecs, falling back, as the philologists, so-called, do in desperate cases, upon the Aryan or Indo-European fountain-head.

THE ESSENTIALS OF VERSE.-We shall pro

ceed, accordingly, to state first, what we hold to be the essentials of English verse; and afterward deal with what we think are the errors of the present systems of versification, looking, in its order, to what is likely to be the Poetry of the Future. The prime essential, as already stated, is Rhythm, of which there are two varieties growing out of the preponderance of iambs and of anapests respectively, varied, however, indefinitely and almost infinitely through combinations of these two feet and the proper use of these and of the two variant feet-the mone and the

fourth pæon.

The word verse, let us here state, has four meanings, of which, however, only two need any mention at this time—the general one, that of rhythmical language or poetry, the antithesis of prose, in which it is always singular and can never take the definitive the, and the special one, of a line in poetry in which it may take either a or the.

We shall have occasion to urge that equality of length, or any approach to equality, even, in verses, is not only unnecessary but even prejudicial to the true aims of legitimate

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