"But neither breath of Morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.”
- Par. Lost, 4. 650 ff.

We see how far better is this arrangement than if Eve said, "Nothing without thee is sweet, neither,"

etc.

is

This figure of Climax,- a gradual rising in power to a conclusion that towers above all that precedes, very common.

ing:

Note the order of terms in the follow

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind."-Tempest, IV. 1.

One form of climax is that which leads us, by one particular after another, up to the main fact of a statement:

"When, fast as shaft can fly,

Bloodshot his eyes, his nostrils spread,

The loose rein dangling from his head,

Housing and saddle bloody red,—

Lord Marmion's steed rushed by." Scott, Marmion, VI.

For oratorical climax, Nichol calls Marc Antony's speech to the citizens, the most remarkable instance in English. “Of more purely poetical climax," he says, "there is no finer example than the concluding lines of Coleridge's Mont Blanc."

We may add that the finest dramatic climax is the last speech of Othello. The conclusion of Pope's Dunciad is another famous climax, and was especially admired by Dr. Johnson.

This

Climax, we see, strengthens the impression of any great or striking part of a statement. But it is also used to make littleness appear' yet more little, the laughable or mean still more laughable or mean. is called Anticlimax. We ascend nearly to the height of the climax, the sublime, then fall either to the absurd, mean, or to some other unexpected end.

-

"Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last."

- Pope, Rape of the Lock.

"Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!"

- Hamlet, II. 2. "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” — Pope.

For purposes of sarcasm. Pope:
:-

"Go teach eternal wisdom how to rule,

Then drop into thyself, and be a fool."

For purposes of mere wit:

66

When late I attempted your pity to move,
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But, why did you kick me down stairs?"

These examples of intentional anticlimax are, of course, to be held apart from the rhetorical fault of the

same name, which is simply a bad climax. With the infinite blunders and bad uses of figurative poetry we are not concerned, as the aim of our study is to find out all that is peculiar to the style of good poets.

PART III.

METRE.

CHAPTER VI.

THE science of verse is the most difficult part of Poetics, and yet it is the most important; for metrical form is "the sole condition . . . absolutely demanded by poetry." The chief difficulty lies in the great confusion of opinion about the essential laws and tests of verse. There is no fixed use of terms, no full agreement even on some of the simplest elements of the science. We must therefore proceed carefully, accepting only the more generally admitted facts, and refusing to follow those sweeping changes of recent writers, which are in so many cases merely destructive of old theory without offering solid basis for new rules.

§ 1. RHYTHM.

A Syllable is a body of sound brought out with an independent, single, and unbroken breath (Sievers). This syllable may be long or short, according to the time it fills compare the syllables in merrily with the syllables in corkscrew. Further, a syllable may be heavy or light (also called accented or unaccented) according as it receives more or less force or stress of

tone: compare the two syllables of streamer. Lastly, a syllable may have increased or diminished height of tone, -pitch: cf. the so-called "rising inflection" at the end of a question. Now, in spoken language, there are infinite degrees of length, of stress, of pitch. If phonetic spelling come to be firmly established, we shall also have a phonetic versification to note these degrees. But while some new systems have been advocated (e.g., Ellis's plan for a new metrical terminology; or see a report, in the Academy, Jan. 10, 1885, of a paper read before the Philological Society in London it advocates a "phonetic notation, providing signs for all the significant sounds, as well as for at least three degrees of stress and five of length") none has been established. Our conventional versification recognizes only accented and unaccented, long and short syllables.

It is a well-known property of human speech that it keeps up a ceaseless change between accented and unaccented syllables. A long succession of accented syllables becomes unbearably monotonous; a long succession of unaccented syllables is, in effect, impossible. Now when the ear detects at regular intervals a recurrence of accented syllables, varying with unaccented, it perceives Rhythm. Measured intervals of time are the basis of all verse, and their regularity marks off poetry from prose; so that Time is thus the chief element in Poetry, as it is in Music and in Dancing. From the idea of measuring these time-intervals, we derive the name Metre; Rhythm means pretty much the same thing, "a flowing," an even, measured motion. This rhythm is found everywhere in nature: the beat of the