of them more important than the other two, longer or more emphatic. Doubtless a few examples of three short syllables in succession may be discovered by a diligent examination of the whole body of English poetry; but they are very few.

In fact, our speech is so accentual that we find it almost impossible to give exactly equal emphasis to two syllables in the same foot; and we are therefore deprived of the use of the spondee, made up of two longs, a foot which was most useful in the versification of the Greeks and Romans. More than one English word taken by itself seems to be a spondee, baseball, for instance, and stronghold; but when such words are used in verse, either the first syllable or the second is likely to be so lengthened or emphasized that we have a trochee or an iambus. Spondees can be discovered in English verse, especially in Milton, but they are infrequent. Two other feet known to classic meter are the amphibrach, -, a short, a long, and a short; and the amphimacer, -, a long, a short, and a long. But neither of these has established itself in English verse; and when either of them has been attempted, the result is very doubtfully distinguishable from a sequence of dactyls or anapests. Even Coleridge, a master of metrics, was not able to construct an English amphibrach and an English amphimacer which should set itself off sharply from the anapest. Here is his ingenious attempt to exemplify the several feet:

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.

Iambics march from short to long;

With a leap and a bound, the swift Anapests throng;
One syllable long with a short at each side

Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride:

First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred racer.

To scan a line is to divide it into its constituent feet, to mark the longs and the shorts, to count the feet and to declare their character. All verse in the English language can be scanned with the aid of the trochee and the iambic, the anapest and the dactyl. When we scan Longfellow's line we find that it consists of four trochees; and therefore we describe it as trochaic tetrameter. When a line has two feet we call it dimeter; with three feet it is trimeter; with four it is tetrameter; with five, pentameter; with six, hexameter, and with seven, heptameter. When Drake's line is scanned it is seen to be iambic tetrameter; Byron's is anapestic tetrameter; and Hood's is dactylic tetrameter. When we scan Gray's

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

we find this scheme

and we declare that the line is iambic pentameter. And if we examine the first line of Baring Gould's hymn, Onward, Christian soldiers!

we discover that the scheme is

1^-12-12

and we decide that it is trochaic trimeter. Austin Dobson's

Too hard it is to sing

In these untuneful times!

declares itself at once as iambic trimeter:

and Rudyard Kipling's

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg

is obviously anapestic heptameter, although it contains iambics as well as anapests, as the translation into symbols discloses at once:

And this apparent irregularity, this commingling of anapests and iambics, leads us to another point of prime significance. Verse consists of a regular arrangement of feet, of a pattern which can be taken in by the ear without undue tension. In any single foot the ear permits many liberties with the short syllables; but it tolerates only a little license with the long syllable. If there are in a line the required number of long syllables, of emphatic beats, the ear is not at all particular about the less important short syllables. These may be inserted or even on occasion omitted altogether, without interfering with the rhythm, with the swing of the line as the ear expects to receive it. For example, an iambic pentameter may have an added syllable at the end almost without our noting it, as in Shakspere's

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Or the final short syllable of a terminal trochee may be dropped without spoiling the expected pattern, as in Longfellow's "Psalm of Life":—

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. [~]

Here the rhythm is trochaic; and its flow is not broken by the dropping out of these short syllables at the end of the second and fourth lines. We may translate these lines into symbols, enclosing the dropped syllables in brackets.

These lines still retain their four emphatic beats; and so long as the ear can perceive these beats it is satisfied. These beats carry the tune, so to speak. The ear not only permits variation of feet inside the framework of beats, it is even delighted when this is so adroitly done as to evade the monotony of strict regularity. For example, the ear authorizes the poet to substitute a trochee for an iambus in the first foot of an iambic pentameter, as in Shakspere's

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend.

And it does not protest when a similar substitution is made in one of the other feet, as in the fourth foot of Shakspere's

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act.

~-|~-|u-|-ulu

The ear does not protest because it is not sharply conscious of the substitution. It expects the five long syl

lables to occur substantially in the established order; and if this expectation is fulfilled, it is more or less unconscious of the minor irregularity. In iambic meters, it allows not only the occasional substitution of a trochee but the frequent substitution of anapests. So in anapestic meters, it is willing to accept an occasional iambus. Indeed, in many ballads there is such an intermixture of the iambus and of the anapest that it is almost impossible to decide whether the rhythm is really iambic or anapestic. In the older traditional ballads, the iambus predominates, but there is a free infusion of anapests, as in this line from "Sir Patrick Spens" :

To send us out, at this time of the year.

These traditional ballads were, many of them, composed early in the history of English poetry by unknown bards, who were guileless of critical theory, and who sang their stanzas into being to please the ears of their own artless contemporaries. The traditional nursery-rimes are equally spontaneous; and they cast an equal illumination upon the natural methods of English versification. If we examine certain of the primitive nursery-rimes we can see that the untutored lyrists unhesitatingly dropped out short syllables, never doubting that the ears of their young hearers would carry the tune securely in spite of this omission. One of the most familiar of nursery-rimes begins

Hark! Hark!

The dogs do bark

The beggars are come to town.