In order to present our scanning as it is to the ear and not as it is to the eye merely, we are obliged at this point to anticipate a little. Although it belongs to a division of our subject farther on, we give here the natural puctuation and paragraphing of this passage, in order to show before leaving it that our scanning is natural, and therefore correct. Any educated reader before an intelligent audience would render the extract, preserving the author's punctuation, which is not always of the best, in some such way as this:

"Never stoops | the soaring vulture on his quarry in the desert,on | the sick or wound. | ed bison, but another vulture, watch | ing from his high | ae | rial look out, sees the downward plunge, and follows; and a third pursues | the second, com | ing from | the invisible ether, first | a speck, and then a vulture, till | the air | is dark | with pin | ions. So disasters come | not sing|ly; but as if they watched and wait | ed, scan | ning one anoth- Į er's motions, when the first | descends, | the others follow, follow, gathering flock-1 wise round their victim, sick | and wounded, first a shadow, then a sorrow, till the air is dark with an | guish."

THE DACTYL.-The same line of argument applies to this foot that we have applied to

the trochee. The objection to it rests, primarily, upon the law of utterance, according to which the voice of articulate-speaking men rests-pauses-upon the strong syllables as naturally and as really as does the foot of earth-walking men upon the tracks they make in walking. Those that wish to defend the time-honored dactyl at all hazards, may reply that the steps of a man may be measured from the track forward as well as backward; and this seems to be true enough until we reach a stopping place. There we detect the untruth of the assumption and the fallacy in the illustration. Let us be a little more explicit, even at the risk of being tedious, for the benefit of our cavilling friends. Suppose that we are to measure a given number-say three-trimeter-steps in a road. We may find that the last one is the longest, and wish to say so. Now, would any intelligent, any sane, mind conceive that we had measured the third step out forward from the last track? Certainly not; because the supposition is absurd, from the impossibility of determining any length, there being, in fact, no limit marked at all. If, now, our dactyl

defenders should lose patience, and say testily that our homely illustration is puerile, we should be forced to reply that the objection it was aimed to answer is a silly one.

Let us proceed to apply this principle to some well-known examples of the so-called dactylic systems. Many of the books quote the opening section of Byron's Bride of Abydos, or four verses of it to illustrate dactylic rhythm. We wish none better to prove that the rhythm is anapestic. Although we have already quoted the beginning four verses, for another purpose, we shall here give the brief section entire; because the fact that the poet lapsed, as it were, without thinking of it, into the acknowledgedly anapestic movement, shows that nature thus overcame an artificiality in spite of the best start in the world.

We shall give at the outset the true scanning of the passage, and then turn to some of the prosodists and examine their efforts to make it dactylic. The system is anapestic throughout, and the verses are correctly scanned thus ·

"Know ye the land where the cy | press and

myrtle,

Are emblems

their clime; |

of deeds that are done in

Where the rage of the vul | ture, the love of the

turtle,

Now melt into

crime? |

sorrow, now mad den to

Know ye the land of the ce | dar and vine, | Where the flowers | ever blossom, the beams | ever shine;|

Where the light | wings of zephyr, oppressed | with perfume, !

Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gúl in her bloom:

Where the cit | ron and olive are fair | est of fruit,

And the voice of the night | ingale never is mute; |

Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky,

In color though varied, in beau | ty may vie, | And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye ; | Where the virgins are soft as the roses they

twine, I

And all, save the spirit of man is divine? | 'Tis the clime | of the East; 'tis the land of the Sun-|

Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done? |

Oh! wild as the accents of lovers' farewell | Are the hearts which they bear, and the tales | which they tell. | "

None but the inattentive reader need be told that "Know" in the first and fifth verses is a mone; that "tle Are em" and "tle Now

melt" are regular anapests like the rest; and that "Wax faint," "In col," "And all" and

"Oh! wild" are iambs that serve, as the mones do, to impart variety by breaking the monotony of anapests.

We now turn to the prosodists. There are three of them-Prosodist A, Prosodist B and Prosodist C. They agree in making these verses, at least the first four of them, dactylic. Prosodist A tells us that these "dactyls " are to be scanned thus:

"Know ye the land where the cypress and | myrtle;"

where he stops long enough to inform us that this verse is dactylic tetrameter catalectic, inasmuch as it consists of four dactyls, less one weak syllable, the departure from uniformity being for pleasing variety. He then goes on with the scanning:

"Are | emblems of deeds that are done in their | 1 clime;"

and proceeds learnedly to advise us that the "Are" is an extra syllable, which is hypermetrical, or else we are to regard the verse as (double) acephalous, in which case there are two syllables wanting to complete that initial