Now melt into sorrow, now madden to

crime?"

This shows that, whether we call the system anapestic, as it is, or dactylic, as the prosodists have heretofore insisted on, there is no escaping the necessity of running some lines into those following in order to complete the feet. We are concerned just here mainly in showing that this necessity does not grow out of our own system of scanning. Edgar Poe has gone over this point very successfully, and there is no need of our repeating his proofs.

Miss Proctor's familiar lines are scanned thus:

"One by one | the sands | are flow

ing, One by one the moments fall; |

Some are coming, some are go- |

ing; Do not strive to grasp | them all. | "

Here the double rhymes serve the important end of giving a weak syllable to the following feet, thus reducing the number of mones, or exceptional feet, in the system. Frequently double rhymes are merely rhymes, having no rhythmic value; but here they have.

We return to the trochee.

The same course of reasoning that we have applied to the Psalm of Life we propose to apply to other so-called trochaics. We take Tennyson's Locksley Hall, which all the prosodists call trochaic. It is iambic, being precisely like the Psalm of Life. An apparent that is to say, a visible-difference is that the stanzas are arranged in couplets by Tennyson, while Longfellow divides them into quatrains. One stanza, which we scan as we think it should be, will suffice for illustration:

"He will hold | thee, when | his passion shall have spent its nov | el force,

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than | his horse. | "

There are some poems in which this monic syllable comes in almost every verse. Pope's well-known hymn is generally called trochaic, but is clearly iambic. We quote it entire, for the reason that the close shows that the artificial frequency of the initial mone was forced to yield to nature in even so short a poem as this. We give the correct scanning: "Vital spark | of heaven | ly flame, | Quit, O quit this mor | tal frame; | Trembling, hop | ing, ling | ering, fly | ing,

O, the pain, the bliss of dying.”
Cease, fond nature, cease | thy strife, |
And let me lan | guish in | to life. |

"Hark, they whisper, an ❘ gels say, |
Sister spirit, come | away. |
What is this | absorbs me quite; |
Steals my senses, shuts | my sight, I
Drowns my spirit, draws

Tell me, my soul, I can this

my breath? |

be death? |

Heaven opens on my eyes; | my ears |

With sounds | seraphic ring: |

Lend, lend your wings; | I mount, │I fly; |
O grave, where is thy victory? |

O death, where is | thy sting? | "

Here the last six verses are pure iambic, the false theory of melody with which the poet started yielding to nature after a struggle through nearly a dozen verses.

The admirers of Poe, and they are deservedly numerous, will doubtless claim that that author, being one of the cleverest of critics and unquestionably the best verse-artist before Tennyson, ought to have known what kind of verse he was using in his Raven-a poem unsurpassed, many hold, in American literature, one to which the poet devoted his choicest efforts, and one about the composition of which he wrote a very full and unusu.. ally clever paper. We could probably not find

a more confident defender of his own theories than this author; and we take pleasure in selecting his strongest point for our attack. Poe's Philosophy of Composition was written mainly to explain his production of The Raven; and it is in regard to the matter bcfore us-what the rhythm of it is-that he says: "Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or [the] metre of The Raven. The former is trochaic-the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with hypermeter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic." This is clear enough. He meant to write, and thought he was writing, in trochaic rhythm; while we think, and shall try to prove, that he wrote an iambic rhythm. In order to make his meaning unmistakably clear in another way, we shall give the opening stanza with the author's scanning:

"Once up on a midnight | dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, |

Over many a quaint and | curious | volume | of for- | gotten lore

While I nodded, I nearly | napping, | suddenly there came a | tapping, |

As of some one | gently rapping, | rapping at my chamber door. I

"Tis some visit | or,' I | muttered, 'tapping at my! chamber door

Only this and | nothing | more.' \"

This is the poet's own scanning. It gives us "lore," "door,"

four exceptional

feet

'door," and "more"-which he calls cœsuras. We have no objection to either the name or the fact; but we call such feet

mones.

Let us now leave out what the poet-critic has told us about his prosody; and proceed to enquire upon the basis of nature and common-sense, how this stanza and all its costanzas are scanned. As the reader's voice steps through the syllables of The Raven, it naturally dwells upon the strong syllableswe accept the poet's own estimates as to strong and weak in the case of every syllable -and so doing finds the measure complete at the close of every leading verse-division. It stops and rests naturally there; the most important of these divisions being the stanza itself on "more," the less important ones being the verse-closes "lore," "door," and door." We follow the reader's voice, pausing where it does, and there marking the ends