from the cast-iron regularity of the Latin alcaic to the wide license of a Greek comic senarius or an English anapæstic tetrameter. In blank verse or in couplets every verse is (certain equivalent values being once recognized) exactly equal to every other verse. In stanzas from the quatrain to the Spenserian the parallelism, if more intricate, is equally exact.

Now the requirement of a perfect prose rhythm is that, while it admits of indication by quantity-marks, and even by divisions into feet, the simplicity and equivalence of feet within the clause answering to the line are absent, and the exact correspondence of clause for clause, that is to say, of line for line, is absent also, and still more necessarily absent. Let us take an example. I know no more perfect example of English prose rhythm than the famous verses of the last chapter of the Canticles in the Authorized Version; I am not certain that I know any so perfect. Here they are arranged for the purpose of exhibition in clauselines, quantified and divided into feet.

Set me as ǎ seal | upon thine heart | as a seal | upon thine arm |

For love is strong | ãs death | jeālõusỷ ¦ is crûěl | ǎs the grāve |

The coals thereof | are coals | of fire | which hãth | ă most vẽ | hěment flame |
Many waters | cânnot quênch love | neither | căn the floods | drown it |

If ǎ man! should give | all the sub | stance of his house | for love | it should ût | terly bě contemned. |

I by no means give the quantification of this, or the distribution into lines and feet as final or impeccable, though I think it is, on the whole-as a good elocutionist would read the passage accurate enough. But the disposition will, I think, be sufficient to convince anyone who has an ear and a slight acquaintance with res metrica, that here is a system of rhythm irreducible to poetic form. The movement of the whole is perfectly harmonious, exquisitely modulated, finally complete. But it is the harmony of perfectly modulated speech, not of song; harmony, in short, but not melody, divisible into clauses,

but not into bars or staves, having parts which continue each other, but do not correspond to each other. A similar example may be found in the almost equally beautiful Charity passage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and if the reader likes to see how the sense of rhythm flourishes in these days, he may compare that with the version which has been substituted for it by the persons called Revisers. But let us take an example of different kind and of less elaborate but still beautiful form, the already cited close of Sir William Temple's Essay on Poetry :

"When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

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Here the division is that which has been noted as the usual one in eighteenth century prose, an arsis (to alter the use of the word a little) as far as child," a level space of progress till "asleep," and then a thesis, here unusually brief, but quite sufficient for the purpose. But here also the movement is quite different from that of poetry. Part of the centre clause, 66 but like a froward child that must be played with," may indeed be twisted into something like a heroic, but there is nothing corresponding to it earlier or later, and the twisting itself is violent and unnatural, for the clause or prose-line does not begin at "but," and does not end at "with."

Here is yet another and longer passage, this time from Mr. Ruskin, who, though he has by no means always observed the distinction we are discussing, and has taught many maladroit imitators to neglect it, is, when he is at his best, thoroughly sound. The sentence chosen shall be a long one, such as the writer loves :

"He did not teach them how to build for glory and for

beauty, He did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation, that we might give the work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and to the hammer: He has not cloven the earth with rivers that their wild white waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under, as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases: He brings not up His quails by the east wind only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men: He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven."

At first sight it may seem that this admirable passage (the brilliant effect of which is not in the least due to spilth of adjectives, or to selection of exotic words, or to eccentricity of word-order, for the vocabulary is very simple and plain, and the order is quite natural) incurs some of the blame due to the merely conglomerate sentence, in which the substitution of fullstops for colons or commas is sufficient to break up the whole into independent wholes. But it does not, and it is saved from this condemnation not merely by the close connection of its matter, but by the arrangement of its form. The separate members have a varying but compensating harmony, and the ascent and descent of the sentence never finally ends till the last word, which has been led up to by a most cunning and in no invidious sense prosaic concatenation of rhythm. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, is not always impeccable. In a fine passage of The Harbours of England (too long for quotation, but which may be conveniently found at p. 378 of the Selections from his works) I find the following complete heroics imbedded in the prose :

"Hot in the morning sun, rusty and seamed."

"The grass of spring, the soft white cloud of foam."

"Fading or flying high into the breeze."
"Brave lives dashed

Away about the rattling beach like weeds."
"Still at the helm of every lonely boat,

Through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand."

Now this is wrong, though of course it is impossible always to avoid a complete heroic cadence. So is it, also, with a very elaborate, and in its somewhat illegitimate way, very beautiful passage of Charles Kingsley, which will be in all recollections, the Dream of Amyas at the Devil's Limekiln. This sins not by conscious or unconscious insertions of blank verse, but by the too definitely regular and lyrical sweep of the rhythm in the words, "I saw the grand old galleon," etc. This is the great difficulty of very ornate prose, that it is constantly tending to overstep the line between the two rhythms. When this fault is avoided, and the prose abides strictly by its own laws, and draws its ornament, not from aniline dyes of vocabulary, but from harmony of arrangement, nothing can be more beautiful and more satisfactory. But in fact such prose does not differ at all in kind from satisfactory specimens of the simpler style, and it was De Quincey's great critical fault that he not only overlooked but denied this identity in his scornful criticisms of the style of Swift and other severe writers. The same principles are applied with more or less elaboration as the case may be, the criterion of appropriateness in each case being the nature of the subject and the circumstances of the utterance.

It is because the rule of prose writing is in this way so entirely a μoλúßdivos kavův, because between the limits of cacophony on the one hand and definitely metrical effect on the other, the practitioner must always choose and can never merely follow, that prose writing is so difficult, that the examples of great eminence in it are so rare, and that even these examples are for the most part so unequal. It is easy to pro

duce long passages of English poetry which are absolutely flawless, which, each according to its own plan and requirements, could not be better. It is by no means easy to produce long passages of English prose, or of any prose, of which as much can be said. The artist lacks the help of obvious and striking error which he possesses in poetry. In poetry, as in the typewriter on which I write these words, a bell rings loudly to warn of certain simple dangers. The muse of prose is silent, however awkwardly her suitors make love to her. In arranging the passages which follow, not the least difficulty has been the occurrence of these sudden flaws and inequalities in specimens otherwise admirable. Omission, even indicated by asterisks, would have been fatal to the attainment of the object, which is to show the author's style in every case as the author wrote it, and not a remaniement by the editor. In some few cases passages exhibiting a glaring drop in style have been purposely chosen, but as a rule this naturally had to be avoided. In the simpler style there is of course less danger of flaws-Swift is often quite impeccable-but as the style rises the danger increases. I do not think that even in Landor or in Mr. Ruskin, the most accomplished, as the most opposed, English writers of the elaborate style during this century, it is possible to find an unbroken passage of very considerable length which is absolutely faultless.

This art of rhythmical arrangement, applicable in sentences so simple as that quoted from Temple, as much as in sentences so complex as that quoted from Mr. Ruskin, applicable indeed in sentences much simpler than the one and even more complicated (though such complication may be perhaps best avoided) than the other, is undoubtedly the principal thing in prose. Applied in its simplest forms, it is constantly missed by the vulgar, but is perhaps productive of