Warriors and Chiefs! should the | shaft or the | sword Heed not a corse, though | a king's, in your | path: Byron. Onward she | glides, amid | ripple and | spray Bright as the visions of | youth ere they | part, Hervey. Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, Heber. AMPHIBRACH MEASURE. This is seldom employed as a regular metre in our poetry, and, as has been before remarked, it may easily be read as anapests or dactyls. In fact, it is often difficult. to decide in many of our trissyllabic poems whether the measure is of one kind or the other; licenses are so common that, frequently, the rhythm of each verse is different. The general character of the melody will alone enable us to determine the measure of the piece. In the following extracts the general character of the metre is amphibrach, though, by regarding the first foot as an iambus, it would become anapestic, while by beginning with a single syllable it would be dactylic. Thy vows are all broken, And share in its shame. Ibid. There came to the beach a | poor exile | of Erin; Campbell. The third verse of this last stanza is purely anapestic, and indeed the whole poem reads best in that measure. Away ye gay landscapes, | ye gardens of roses! Byron. Macgregor, | Macgregor, | remember | our foemen! Hogg. The following are examples in which the rhythm is so mixed that it is difficult to say which kind they belong to: Mont Blanc is the monarch | of mountains, They crown'd him long ago On a throne of rocks, | in a robe | of clouds, Around | his waist | are for | ests braced, The av' lanche in | his hand; But ere | it fall, I that thun | dering ball e war of the main, Byron. Now silently poised I was a child, and | she was a | child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love | that was more than love, With a love that the winged ser | aphs of heaven Edgar Allan Poe. CLASSIC METRES. The various metres that have been already classified and illustrated may be styled English or regular metres, in contradistinction to Classic or irregular ones. No great English poem has ever been written, in English, in any other measure than one of those before mentioned. Various attempts, however, have been made by scholars in recent times to introduce, certain of the classical metres into our language; but it is pretty generally admitted that these experiments are, for the most part, failures. They are all made upon the principle of substituting quantity for accent, whereas English verse must have accentual rhythm, or be no verse at all. A spondaic line of English words, for instance, would be totally destitute of rhythm, if it were read in time; but one could hardly help reading it without laying stress on the alternate syllables, thus at once destroying the quantity and substituting accent in its place. It may safely be said that any of those experiments which are regarded by competent judges as successful, are only so in proportion as the long syllables in them are identical with the accented ones, and that the less often these coincidences occur, the less of the characteristics of English verse the pieces have. Hexameter is the only measure in which any success can be said to have been attained. The Classic metres that have thus been experimented on are, Hexameter, Pentameter, Sapphic, and Alcaic; the formulæ of which are as follow: 1 Sapphics |__ | _|__|-~| 31 | - Three lines of these followed by Alcaics -|-|-~~ | 15 Two lines of these followed by Longfellow has written his Evangeline and the Courtship of Miles Standish in hexameters. Tennyson, Dr. Arnold, Dr. Whewell, and other scholars of eminence, have also used it both in original poems and translations. Pentameters are used along with hexameters to form the Elegiac verse of the ancients. Dr. Whewell has translated some of Schiller's minor poems into it. Dr. Watts, Cowper, Southey, and Canning (the last in parody both of the metre and subject-matter of much of Southey's earliest efforts) have attempted English sapphics. The present Poet Laureate has recently written some English alcaics. HEXAMETERS. Fair was she to be | hold, that | maiden of | seventeen | summers, Black were her | eyes as the | berry that | grows on the thorn by the wayside, Black, yet how softly they | gleamed beneath the brown | shade of hertresses! Sweet was her breath as the | breath of | kine that | feed in the | meadows. Evangeline. 1 The dactyl and trochee in the first and the third foot respectively would be inadmissible in classic poetry. The annexed specimens of sapphics are scanned in such a manner as to give them every chance of being considered rhythmical. |