IMITATION OF TIME AND MOTION.

When the merry bells ring round,

And the jocund rebecs sound

To many a youth and many a maid

Dancing in the checkered shade.—Milton: L’Allegro.

Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;

The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,

Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.

Pope: Hom. Odys.

Which urged, and labored, and forced up with pain,

Recoils and rolls impetuous down, and smokes along the plain.

Dryden: Lucretius.

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Pope: Essay on Criticism.

Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Pope: Essay on Criticism.

Oft on a plat of rising ground

I hear the far-off curfew sound,

Over some wide-watered shore,

Swinging slow with sullen roar.—Milton: Il Penseroso.

The well-known hexameters of Virgil, descriptive respectively of the galloping of horses over a resounding plain, and of the heavy blows in alternately hammering the metal on the anvil, afford good examples,—the dactylic, of rapidity, the spondaic, of slowness.

Æneid, viii. 596.