t and quantity, will no
more impart it, than a knowledge of the 'Guide to Music' will make a
Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and
imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by
musical; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence
there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,
created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of
feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's
harp, as the winds visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity
which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become
its formal ones,--not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or
trochees; which are the reduction of it to its _less_ than dry bones.
You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or
fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse,
if time and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this is
often done; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of
two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are
expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried
notes, or with long; or as the choristers in a cathedral retard or
precipitate the words of the chant, according as the quantity of its
notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to
demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they
settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as
they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled
notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the
advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without
being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between
our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms
unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will
present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference
between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope,
Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is
the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the _Rape of
the Lock_,--exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers.
The reader will observe that it is literally _see-saw_, like the
rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is
jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down mor