ish too; but it is a subtler and more
occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the
rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where
there is more than rhythm,--where there is music,--quantity is a
very important factor. For example, in the line

"That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,"

you can hear how the sound is held up on the word _take,_ because
the _k_ is followed by the _t_ in _to;_ and what a wonderful
musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and
lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no
stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were
to denote the tones the syllables should be--shall I say _sung
on?_ Now French is an example of a language without stresses;
you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying
amount of time to enounce. I imagine the basic principle of
Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a
length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel
retarded the flow of tone, as in _take to_ in the line quoted
just now.

Now if you try to write a hexameter in English on the Greek
principle, you get something without the least likeness either to
a Greek hexameter or to music; because the language is one of
stresses, not, primarily, of tones.

"This is the forest pimeval; the murmuring pines and
the hemlocks."

will not do at all; there is no Greek spondee in it but--_rest
prime_--; and Longfellow would have been surprised if you had
accused that of spondeeism. What you would get would be
something like these--I forget who was responsible for them:

"Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order."

Lines like these could never be poetry; poetry could never be
couched in lines like these;--simply because poetry is an
arrangement of words upon a frame-work of music: the poet has to
hear the music within before his words can drop naturally into
the places in accordance with it. You could not imitate a French
line in English, because each of the syllables would have to be
equally stressed; you could not imitate an English line in
French, because in that language there are none of the stresses
on which an English line depends for its rhythm.

But when I read Chaucer I am forced to the conclusion that what
he tried to do was precisely that: to imitate French music; to
write Engl