It remains for me to express my gratitude to my friend M. Lerambert, Maître de Conférences à l'École Normale supérieure, whose suggestions were of great use to me while occupied with this little work.

ON THE STRUCTURE

OF ENGLISH VERSE

FEET

The student of English poetry, in order to acquire a correct knowledge of its system of versification, must be careful not to confound accent with quantity. Terms used in Greek and Latin prosody to denote combinations of long and short syllables are also applied to English verse, but with a different meaning, since they are made to express combinations of accented and unaccented syllables, the rhythm of English verse depending entirely on accent, not on quantity..

If the reader attentively examines the following sen

tence:

My father, he was a wealthy lórd, lived beside the Týne,

in which the accented syllables are marked, he will perceive that there is no regular return in it of accented and unaccented syllables: the order in which the words.

are placed constitutes prose, not verse. But if we place then: thus:

My father lived beside the Týne,
A wealthy lórd was hé,

GOLDSMITH.

it will be seen that every unaccented syllable is followed by an accented one. This is verse. By the regular alternation of syllables with and without accent a harmony is produced which is pleasing to the ear and adds a charm to the expression.

In the above verses the accented syllable follows the unaccented one, so that the accents fall on the even syllables. The order may be reversed, and the accented syllable may precede the other, thus:

All the meadows wave with blossoms.

LONGFELLOW.

Another mode of constructing verses consists in arranging the words so that each accented syllable is preceded by two unaccented ones, thus:

At the close of the day when the hámlet is still.

BEATTIE.

A fourth variety may be produced by reversing this order, by placing the accented syllable before the two unaccented ones, thus:

Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cúmberless.

HOGG.

Now if we examine the four different kinds of verse examples of which are given above, we shall find that in