Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/897

 ian, or Adonic,&mdash;this last being a short line composed of "a dactyl and a spondee." Example from Horace:

To arrange eleven syllables in a line, and have half or more of them to form trochees, is no difficult matter; but, to find rhythm in the succession of "a trochee, a spondee, and a dactyl," as we read words, seems hardly practicable. Hence few are the English Sapphics, if there be any, which abide by the foregoing formule of quantities and feet. Those which I have seen, are generally, if not in every instance, susceptible of a more natural scansion as being composed of trochees, with a dactyl, or some other foot of three syllables, at the beginning of each line. The cæsural pause falls sometimes after the fourth syllable, but more generally, and much more agreeably, after the fifth. Let the reader inspect the following example, and see if he do not agree with me in laying the accent on only the first syllable of each foot, as the feet are here divided. The accent, too, must be carefully laid. Without considerable care in the reading, the hearer will not suppose the composition to be any thing but prose:

"."&mdash;( ".")

Among the lyric poems of Dr. Watts, is one, entitled, "THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT; an Ode attempted in English Sapphic." It is perhaps as good an example as we have of the species. It consists of nine stanzas, of which I shall here cite the first three, dividing them into feet as above:

"These lines," says Humphrey, who had cited the first four, "are good English Sapphics, and contain the essential traits of the original as nearly as the two languages, Greek and English, correspond to each other. This stanza, together with the poem, from which this was taken, may stand for a model, in our English compositions."&mdash;Humphrey's E. Prosody, p. 19. This author erroneously supposed, that the trissyllabic foot, in any line of the Sapphic stanza,