"Those ev'ning bells, those ev'ning bells,
How many a tale their music tells!"—Moore's Melodies, p. 263.
This couplet, like all the rest of the piece from which it is taken, is iambic verse, and to be divided into feet thus:—
"Those ev' | -ning bells, | those ev' | -ning bells,
How man | -y a tale | their mu | -sic tells!"
[504] Lord Kames, too, speaking of "English Heroic verse," says: "Every line consists of ten syllables, five short and five long; from which [rule] there are but two exceptions, both of them rare."—Elements of Criticism, Vol. ii, p. 89.
[505] "The Latin is a far more stately tongue than our own. It is essentially spondaic; the English is as essentially dactylic. The long syllable is the spirit of the Roman (and Greek) verse; the short syllable is the essence of ours."—Poe's Notes upon English Verse; Pioneer, Vol. i, p. 110. "We must search for spondaic words, which, in English, are rare indeed."—Ib., p. 111.
[506] "There is a rule, in Latin prosody, that a vowel before two consonants is long. We moderns have not only no such rule, but profess inability to comprehend its rationale."—Poe's Notes: Pioneer, p. 112.
[507] The opponents of capital punishment will hardly take this for a fair version of the sixth commandment.—G. B.
[508] These versicles, except the two which are Italicized, are not iambic. The others are partly trochaic; and, according to many of our prosodists, wholly so; but it is questionable whether they are not as properly amphimacric, or Cretic.
[509] See exercises in Punctuation, on page 786, of this work.—G. B.
[510] The Seventieth Psalm is the same as the last five verses of the Fortieth, except a few unimportant differences of words or points.