disagreement of different authorities as to the "correct" manner of pointing a passage.

A stress mark, for instance, indicates that a particular syllable is to be given a certain prominence but gives no slightest indication of the degree of force required.

A series of stresses equal in metric value may form part of an emotional climax, so that the value of each stress in the series should be greater than the last.

A stress rarely indicates abrupt or clear-cut increase in force. To determine all such questions we must look at the whole character of the verse and of its movement; this is necessary even in the case of the elaborate symbols of musical notation and far more in the speaking of poetry.

In the lines:

Then I cast loose my buff-coat, each hòlster let fall,
Shook off both my jack-boots, let gò belt and all

(R. BROWNING, How they brought the

Good News from Ghent to Aix),

the stresses would be sharp and abrupt, almost like a child's scanning sing-song, as the line suggests the jerking gallop of an exhausted horse.

In such lines as the opening verse of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale the stresses point waves of sound and are in no sense percussion marks. Rather successive waves or jets of vocal tone which culminate on each succeeding stress.

These successive pulse-beats of verse are, physiologically, breath-pressures, they can be marked alternatively by force duration or pitch variation; sometimes, indeed, by all three at once.

In testing an example, the whole poem from which it is taken should be read; the spirit of a poem governs the nature of all the technical details of its interpretation.

THE

SPEAKING OF ENGLISH VERSE

CHAPTER I

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PROSE AND VERSE

WHEN M. Jourdain appreciated with stupefaction the fact that he had all his life been speaking prose, he grasped part of the distinction which exists and must always exist between prose and verse: that in prose we concern ourselves chiefly with setting forth our meaning as simply and clearly as possible, while in verse we express ourselves, our feeling and emotion as well as our logical meaning, through a metric pattern of words.

Directly we have thus stated the difference, limitations and exceptions force themselves upon us. Prose can be as rhythmically beautiful as verse.

Some of the most magnificent prose in the world has been written in entire unconsciousness, of beauty of style, with no other object than to be understood by the vulgar. But other prose writers, after "playing the sedulous ape" to their forerunners, have achieved with great effort an equal simplicity and directness coupled with so musical and individual a cadence that we seem to hear the author thinking aloud.

In significance prose can be as sublime as the

sublimest poetry, as stirring as a ballad, as passionate as a sonnet.

There is a path which no fowl knoweth and which the vulture's eye hath not seen. The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots.

But where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found in the land of the living.

(Job xxviii. 4.)

"The sea," cried the Miller, "Lord help us all, it is the greatest thing God made! That is where all the water in the world runs down into a great salt lake. There it lies as flat as my hand, and as innocent-like as a child; but they do say when the wind blows it gets up into watermountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down great ships, bigger than our mill, and makes such a roaring that you can hear it miles away upon the land. There are great fish in it five times bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on her head.” (R. L. STEVENSON.)

It is not, then, content or the presence or absence of rhythm that distinguishes verse from prose.

In verse itself we may find free forms which to the eye conform to no strict and ordered pattern. There are others, like the ode, where only by going back over the printed page which is the record of the sounds of speech can we make out the pattern of the whole, a pattern in which the repetitions occur at such long distances from one another that we cannot through the ear alone carry its shape clearly enough in our mind.