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The very simplest measure, that of alternate long and short, would be impracticable to any sufficient extent. For such a purpose the recurrences of long and short should be nearly equal, as we shall see presently to be the case in the Greek and Latin. But we need not repine at a lot which necessarily befalls every modern language, regulated and tuned as they are by stress: and the Italian, having much longer words than ours, must have a much greater deluge of unemphatic, and therefore short syllables of ill-proportioned time. Nothing can show more clearly the confusion which has prevailed between quantity and stress than the attempts which have been made to introduce the ancient metres into the modern tongues. So prejudiced are we with the stress, that we are in fact utterly indisposed to any attention to long and short, beyond such as is required for correctness of pronunciation, and are thus rendered quite insensible to that beauty which is the effect of metrical quantity; and so entirely do we read the ancient poetry according to stress, that we could not, without such long and painful practice as none has undertaken, recite a single verse according to quantity and assuredly if we did, then we should astonish the ears of our listeners much more than gratify them.

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CHAPTER III.

ON STRESS.

13. ACCENT, properly so called, does not exist as a recognized regulation of speech in any modern language; however some, as the French and Welsh, possess it to a certain degree. But so much is the contrary the case in ours, that the variation between a higher and lower key in speaking is the mark of a rustic and provincial pronunciation. Since then the Greek and Latin made it no basis. of versification, we have no need of noticing it any further, after having stated that in those languages, as the ear grew more unrefined and lost the measure of quantity, so did it lose also the notes of accent so intimately concerned in it. Thus the acute degenerated into a mere stress, according to which we pronounce the Latin 1, and which also in

1 We may here observe, that in Latin the acute falls on the penultimate of dissyllables, and of such words of more than two syllables as have the penultimate long. Where such words have it short, the accent falls on the antepenultimate. The accent on the last is little congenial with the language.

the Greek still retains its old places, to the great disturbance of the quantity, as in οὐλομένην, which they are obliged to pronounce with the penultimate long, and in av@pwrоs which they must pronounce as a dactyl. For the stress on a single vowel necessarily prolongs its time, and the vowel on which it does not fall must therefore be of a shorter time. While on the principle of accent ἄν might be pronounced in the note A, θρωπος in the note F, without the true quantity being at all affected.

14. It is impossible for us to conceive the richness of the recitation of the old versification, rolling in varied measure of time to the music of its accents. The analogy between its basis and ours of stress has been well illustrated by the comparison of the flute, which holds notes a longer or shorter time, with the drum, which expresses but louder or softer sounds; and indeed the reading of a passage of Tasso or Milton after one of Homer or Virgil, has very much the same effect as the drums which are beaten after the full band has paused. The confusion between things so different has arisen from our being compelled to read the ancient measures according to stress, and in some degree also from the carelessness of applying the word Accent to our modern Stress.

15. The stress is as necessary to give clearness

to speech, as the division into words is to convey it to writing. It distinguishes a word from its neighbour, and would do so most perfectly, and our speech might run without a pause between the words, as the Greek is written in old inscriptions without a break, if the stress fell uniformly on the first, or uniformly on the last syllable of the word; to the first of which conditions there is a prevailing inclination in our language, as to the last in the French. But the monotony would be so intolerable, that we should pay dearly for superior precision, and the stress would be wholly inapplicable as an instrument of verse, since it would be impossible to secure the regular interval of a certain number of unaccented syllables, except at least through a short and painful extent. It falls, therefore, on either syllable of a dissyllable. But when we come to a trisyllable, and place it on the first, we find ourselves rather far back for marking off the whole word, and are inclined to repeat it, faintly indeed, on the last, as appears from our allowing such words as liberty, intemperate, to conclude such verses as necessarily end with an accented syllable. And here lies a great difference between accent and stress. In accent there can be set a decided limit to the height of the voice. In the Greek it rises through the interval of a third. But in stress there can be no certain

limit to loudness. Being thus undefinable, it admits of at least two degrees, and we can so modify one stress in comparison of another, that it may either equal it, or be something less, or almost vanish, as it does at the end of these trisyllables. Thus, in proportion as we feel the need of it, the fainter and secondary stress becomes more sensible; as it does when we place the principal stress so far back as on the fourth syllable from the end, for instance, in the words móderator, admínistration. There we are obliged to make a very decided, if not so full a stress, on the next syllable but one after the place of the first stress: though indeed in many cases, as in the word récolléction, it is difficult to say which is the primary and which the secondary stress. Hence in our language the stress is echoed through every alternate syllable of a word, and our recitation has a waving motion, which becomes very striking in the recitation of what are called iambic or trochaic metres. Thus far it is an admirable instrument of versification, and such measures are almost exclusively the vehicles of our poetry.

16. Now, also, we see how we are to be supplied with what are called the dactylic and anapæstic measures, which require the stress but once in the space of three syllables. Though we cannot represent these so perfectly as the last, yet we may

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