Historical Manual of English Prosody - George Saintsbury

O trip and skip, Elvire! Link arm in arm with me!
Like husband and like wife, together let us see
The tumbling troop arrayed, the strollers on their stage,
Drawn up and under arms, and ready to engage.

(Printing of lines disjoined to show the extra stress which Browning lays on the middle pause, and which, though not universal, is general throughout the poem. The case is rather the other way with Drayton. He observes the pause, which is indeed the law of the line; but he does not seem to avail himself of it much as a prosodic or rhetorical instrument.)

XLIII

The Dying Swan of Tennyson, scanned entirely through to show the application of the system. (It brings out a scheme of dimeters wholly iambic at the lowest rate of substitution, wholly anapæstic at the highest, mixed between. A few instances occur of the other usual and regular licences—trochaic and spondaic substitution, monosyllabic feet (or catalexis) and one or two of brachycatalexis, three feet instead of four. And it is to be specially noted that the poet uses these, not at random, but so as to swell and raise his rhythm, proportionately and progressively, from the slow motion and scanty syllabising of the opening scene-stanza to the "flood of eddying song" at the close. This process is entirely unaccounted for on the bare "four-stress" system.)

II.

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