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3. Rhythmical words and constructions: venerable men; former generation; roar of hostile cannon; heights of yonder metropolis; your country's own means of distinction and defence; ere you slumber in the grave; this monument may moulder away; and many others, as also constant balancing of elements, as, the head of our civil councils, and the destined leader of our military bands.

III.

The Imaginative Type. This type of prose diction has been called "the special and opportune art of the modern world." 1 It is the kind of style that shapes itself, with more or less artistic fitness, when the writer deals with an imaginative theme, and shapes his conceptions in the fancy rather than in the strictness of logic. Success in it requires a special aptitude, not unlike the poet's; if this is lacking, or only studied and second-hand, the style either tends to flatted notes and lapses from sound taste or degenerates into fine writing.2

In this kind of diction language is used somewhat as a musical instrument, to stimulate and gratify the reader's imagination by means of euphonic sound and picturing imagery. Its field is naturally descriptive: we might not unfitly call it descriptive prose. Poetic resources, both of structure and vocabulary, are freely drawn upon. Especially noticeable are epithet and word-painting; also alliteration and other means of pointing and balancing language are prominent. The tendency to rhythm is still more marked than in the impassioned type; that is, its movement approaches more to the measured rhythm of poetry, while never going far enough in this direction to impair the integrity of the prose tissue.

The following, from Ruskin's Stones of Venice, carries this type of prose to the very verge of poetry:

"We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference

1 PATER, Appreciations, p. 7.

2 See above, p. 71.

between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the seablue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange and plumy palm, that abate with their grey green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight."- RUSKIN, Stones of Venice, Vol. ii, p. 172.

In this masterly piece of imaginative description, we see how, as soon as the author gets his point of view and plan determined, the descriptive part (beginning with "and all its ancient promontories ") takes on the picturing language and not a little of the movement of poetry. Let us notice a few of these poetic elements:

1. Epithets. - Decorative: sirocco wind; ancient promontories; golden pavement; terraced gardens; plumy palm; lucent sand; orient colors; rainy green; heathy moor; grisly islands; into the sea-blue.

2. Word-painting: sleeping in the sun; a great peacefulness of light; glowing softly with terraced gardens; the hunger of the north wind; grey swirls of rain-cloud; flaky veils of the mist of the brooks; tormented by furious pulses.

3. Alliteration: a grey stain of storm; bossy beaten work; mixed among masses of laurel, and orange and plumy palm; mighty masses of leaden rock; bites their peaks into barrenness. No less masterly than these repe

titions of sounds are the delicately varied combinations of sounds, both vowel and consonantal.

4. Rhythm encroaching on metre:

And all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun.

Here and there an angry spot of thunder.

With bossy beaten work of mountain chains.

Spreading low along the pasture lands.

By furious pulses of contending tide.1

Summary. The intense identification of the writer's soul with the subject-matter and its occasion, which produces these effects, fervid or imaginative, wherein prose diction approaches to the diction of poetry, requires, in greater degree according to the loftiness of the occasion, to be supplemented by a taste made sound and chaste through conversance with the best literary ways, and by a skill great enough to put knowledge into self-justifying forms of art. If these are lacking the composition, while it may be luxuriant, is like the run-wild luxuriance of the tropics: it evinces merely power or emotion undirected. On the other hand, poetic effects cannot be manufactured, in cold blood, by any manipulation of word and phrase and figure. The two, emotion and art, must be

thoroughly fused together.

1 The subject of prose rhythm, as related to the rhythm of poetry, is discussed in the next chapter, pp. 210-220.

CHAPTER VII.

RHYTHM IN POETRY AND IN PROSE.

BOTH poetry and prose, the latter no less imperatively than the former, must have rhythm; that is, a more or less even and regular flow of syllables long and short, accented and unaccented. In both the same principles of rhythm obtain, and to an extent run parallel; only, in poetry one more element is operative than in prose, the element of measure or systematic recurrence; wherefore the rhythm of poetry is called metre, from the Greek word μérpov, "a measure.

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Metre, this measured rhythm, is the basal and determining principle of English verse. As such it is merely a conventional law, evolved from the genius of the language, according to which the elevated sweep of poetic diction is made orderly and musical. It is, however, not the only active rhythmical motive, nor does the introduction of it in any sense supplant another element still more fundamental. Moving over the same field there is also an unmeasured, constantly varied, exceedingly flexible grouping of syllables, which may be called the rhythm of the phrase. This latter, interwoven with the metrical, works in poetry to impart a graceful variety to its uniformity; while, moving unconventionally by itself, it constitutes that sonority and largeness of phrase which we call prose rhythm.

1" Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what principle the law is based, so it be a law." STEVENSON,

On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, Works (Thistle edition), Vol. xxii, p. 250.

It is the design of the present chapter to define these two kinds of rhythm, as they appear by themselves, and as they work together.

I. ELEMENTS OF POETIC RHYTHM.

In its progressive organization of articulate sounds metre observes according to its own system the grammatical analogy of the phrase, the clause, and the sentence: it groups syllables into feet, feet into verses or lines, and lines into stanzas. Farther than this we need not follow it here; as indeed farther than this, and in some types from the verse onward, poetry coincides in organism with prose.

I.

The Metrical Unit: the Foot. - Every kind of measure must have a unit of measurement. The unitary procedure from which poetic metre starts is the grouping of syllables into twos or threes, each group being called a foot. Thus the standard types of metre take their rise, the kinds of feet being distinguished from one another by their various arrangements of accented and unaccented syllables.

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NOTE. The names and definitions of the feet are derived from classical prosody, which estimates syllables not by accent but by quantity, as short, long, and neutral. Quantity also plays an appreciable part in English syllabication, enough perhaps to justify defining in terms of quantity, as we shall do here; though the prosody of our language is more accentual than quantitative, more like speech, less like a kind of sing-song or chant.

The very different genius of our prosody from that of Latin and Greek can best be illustrated from musical rhythm. Take for instance the opening verse of Longfellow's Evangeline, which poem is written to imitate the dactylic hexameter; and the natural musical measure into which it falls is

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