"Let us then be up and doing, With | a heart | for any fate; |

Still achieving, still | pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.)"

Of the latter, this from Parisina:

'But yet, | afar, | from man | to man, |

A cold electric shiv | er ran, |

As down the dead | ly blow | descend-ed |

On him whose life | and love thus end-ed. I'

But the difference between the two is sometimes indistinguishable; and, in our view of it, altogether unimportant.

EXUVIE. Having mentioned the essentials of rhythmic verse, we now turn to the fossil remains of antiquity that are still dragged, on creaking and shaky legs, through our prosodies by the Bourbon grammarians who write our school-books. The feet, so called, that exist only in name, we have designated as quasi-feet. Those most commonly insisted upon by the prosodists are the following:

The Trochee,— ~
The Dactyl,- ·

The Spondee,— ·

The Pyrrhic,

We propose to show that these are not feet at

all in English; and shall take them in the order just named.

From what we have said it is manifest that, excepting the four feet named on a former page-the mone, the iamb, the anapest and the fourth pæon, with which we think we can scan any legitimate verse in our language— we reject all other feet usually treated of in the prosodies. We reject them for reasons specific in every case; and we proceed now to give these in the cases of the four most

common.

THE TROCHEE.-As a rule people are very tenacious of views which they have inherited. This is but another way of saying that it is well-nigh impossible to reason people out of views into which they have not been reasoned. None of us can forget the tenacity with which the Murray school of English grammar-writers-we avoid saying English grammarians, with a purpose-held on to some echoes of Latin and Greek accidence and syntax as well as prosody; such, for instance, as the names and order of the tenses, and the government of the infinitive. We are speaking of Murray's following the

grammars-not the grammar-of the classic tongues; for the tendency of all grammars, and especially since Murray's time, is towards grammar as a science and away from the grammars of pedants, pedagogues and copyists.

The same thing has been done, in a more marked degree, in prosody, by the prosody writers, including Murray himself, down to the present time.

If we should ask an average teacher of prosody his reasons for calling a given system of verse-say, Longfellow's Psalm of Life-trochaic, he would, if he were perfectly frank, probably answer something like this: "Because the system begins with a strong or accented syllable and continues with an alternation of weak and strong ones; because the books so name it; because Mr. Longfellow calls it trochaic; because the trochee is to be found in numerous lyric poets of Greece and Rome; because trochaios means running or tripping; and because the trochee is the reverse of the iamb." His mind has been so long satisfied with such "reasons" as these that he does not perceive that they are not

reasons at all. The only one that comes near being a reason" because the system begins with a strong or accented syllable and continues with an alternation of weak and strong ones"-would, if it were true—that is, as often as it is true-tell directly against his theory. Let us see; and let us examine this point somewhat in detail. The poem just mentioned-A Psalm of Life-begins, as the prosody-writers scan it, thus:

"Tell me not, in | mournful | numbers, |
Life is but an | empty | dream!!
For the soul is dead that | slumbers, |
And things | are not | what they | seem."

When one calls their attention to the odd words "dream" and seem," which even they know are not trochees, he is learnedly informed that the second and fourth verses are either trochaic tetrameter catalectic, or trochaic trimeter hypercatalectic; and one is expected to be crushed by that quantity of learning. If he do not crush up to the expectations had of him, and begins to give sign of further questioning, they proceed to hurl upon him the information that in Latin the Archilochian dimeter, notwithstanding it is

an iambic metre, has been conceded by all grammarians, from Aristarchus to Longinus, to be interchangeable with the trochaic dimeter catalectic, whenever it appears acephalous; thus:

"At | fidēs | ět în | gĕni ;"

but, by all the laws of scansion and all the principles of prosody, it is legitimate to make it trochaic dimeter catalectic, thus:

"At fi des ět | ingě | ni,"

the "ni" being the first syllable of an uncompleted trochee, and the verse therefore a dimcter catalectic, or a hepthemimeris; just as the Galliambus, as occasion requires, may vary the monotony of iambics!

All this, uttered with great volubility and rote-haste, falls upon the head of the Tyro with the crushing weight of solid erudition and terrific technicality that usually crushes him; and he falls into line with the authorities, with sometimes a vague suspicion that he has been listening to nonsense, and consequently has been imposed upon. A few years of training in that school settles him; and he becomes an orthodox prosodial fossil.