Lord, who | art my | Helper; | let thine | aid be | speedy.

This verse, like all other that is written in very long lines, requires a
caesural pause of proportionate length; and it would scarcely differ at all
to the ear, if it were cut in two at the place of this pause--provided the
place were never varied. Such metre does not appear to have been at any
time much used, though there seems to be no positive reason why it might
not have a share of popularity. To commend our versification for its
"boundless variety," and at the same time exclude from it forms either
unobjectionable or well authorized, as some have done, is plainly
inconsistent. Full trochaics have some inconvenience, because all their
rhymes must be double; and, as this inconvenience becomes twice as much
when any long line of this sort is reduced to two short ones, there may be
a reason why a stanza precisely corresponding to the foregoing couplets is
seldom seen. If such lines be divided and rhymed at the middle of the
fourth foot, where the caesural pause is apt to fall, the first part of each
will be a trochaic line of four feet, single-rhymed and catalectic, while
the rest of it will become an iambic line of three feet, with double rhyme
and hypermeter. Such are the prosodial characteristics of the following
lines; which, if two were written as one, would make exactly our full
trochaic of seven feet, the metre exhibited above:--

"Whisp'ring, | heard by | wakeful | maids,
To whom | the night | stars _guide_ | _us_,
Stolen | walk, through | moonlight | shades,
With those | we love | _beside_ | _us_"--_Moore's Melodies_, p. 276.

But trochaic of seven feet may also terminate with single rhyme, as in the
following couplet, which is given anonymously, and, after a false custom,
erroneously, in N. Butler's recent Grammar, as "trochaic of _six feet, with
an additional long syllable_:--

"Night and | morning | were at | meeting | over | Water | -loo;
Cocks had | sung their | _earliest_ | greeting; | faint and | low they
| crew." [511]

In Frazee's Grammar, a separate line or two, similar in metre to these, and
rightly reckoned to have _seven feet_, and many lines, (including those
above from Tennyson, which W. C. Fowler erroneously gives for
_Heptameter_,) being a foot longer, are presented as trochaics of _eight_
feet; but Everett, the surest of our prosodists, remai