respectively, while in the case of the latter line other dispositions are possible. In blank-verse paragraphs especially, the poet is likely to suggest a great deal of such scansion. No doubt there are in this arrangement four-syllable divisions and three-syllable ones like amphibrachs, etc.; but that does not matter, because the line has already passed the regular prosodic tests. And no doubt the sections, or whatever they are to be called, are not strictly substitutable; but then on this scheme, which is not positively prosodic and applies to the individual line only, they need not be. So, too, there is no harm in dividing Hood's famous piece, for musical purposes, into ditrochees:
I remember | I remember,
How my little | lovers came,
or even in making what are practically eight feet out of
All ¦ peo¦ple ¦ that ¦ on ¦ earth ¦ do ¦ dwell,
in order to get an impressive musical effect. Here also the lines have passed the prosodic preliminary or matriculation; as in the one case trochaic tetrameters catalectic split in half; in the other, as ordinary "long measure."
Now it is this necessary preliminary which the plain- and fancy-stress prosodists neglect; putting their stress divisions not on the top, but in the place of it. And the probable result would be, if the proceeding were widely followed—as, indeed, it has been already to some small extent,—the creation of a new chaos like that of fifteenth-century South-English verse generally, or of blank verse and heroic couplet in the mid-seventeenth.
[156] See the larger History for fuller discussion of this. Such lines will often scan trochaically (or in some other way) so as to take in the outside syllable; but the question then arises whether such scansion will suit the context.
[157] Professor Hardie reminds me of Quintilian's assertion (Inst. Orat. IX. iv. 136) that even in Latin, iambs "omnibus pedibus insurgunt."
[158] Note on Ionic a minore as applicable to the Epilogue of Browning's Asolando
It has been proposed to scan the beautiful last words of Robert Browning—