A noble super||fluity it craves
Abhor, a perpe||tuity should stand
Are these lines distinguishable from prose? Scarcely, I think.
The same rule is not applicable to a semipause, which being short and faint, is not sensibly disagreeable when it divides a word.
Relent|less walls || whose darksome round | contains
For her | white virgins || hyme|neals sing
In these | deep solitudes || and aw|ful cells
It must however be acknowledged, that the melody here suffers in some degree. A word ought to be pronounced without any rest betwixt its component syllables. The semipause must bend to this rule, and thereby vanisheth almost altogether.
With regard to the capital pause, it is so essential to the melody, that a poet cannot be too nice in the choice of its place, in order to have it full, clear, and distinct. It cannot be placed more happily than with a pause in the sense; and if the sense require but a comma after the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh syllable, there can be no difficulty about this musical pause. But to make such coincidence essential, would cramp versification too much; and we have experience for our authority, that there may be a pause in the melody where the sense requires none. We must not however imagine, that a musical pause may be placed at the end of any word indifferently. Some words, like syllables of the same word, are so intimately connected as not to bear a separation even by a pause. No good poet ever attempted to separate a substantive from its article: the dividing such intimate companions, would be harsh and unpleasant. The following line, for example, cannot be pronounced with a pause as marked.
If Delia smile, the || flow’rs begin to spring
But ought to be pronounced in the following manner.
If Delia smile, || the flow’rs begin to spring.
If then it be not a matter of indifferency where to make the pause, there ought to be rules for determining what words may be separated by a pause and what are incapable of such separation. I shall endeavour to unfold these rules; not chiefly for their utility, but in order to exemplify some latent principles that tend to regulate our taste even where we are scarce sensible of them. And to that end, it seems the eligible method to run over the verbal relations, beginning with the most intimate. The first that presents itself, is that of adjective and substantive, being the relation of substance and quality, the most intimate of all. A quality cannot exist independent of a substance, nor is it separable from it even in imagination, because they make parts of the same idea; and for that reason, it must, with regard to melody, be disagreeable, to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence, by interjecting a pause betwixt it and its substantive. I cannot therefore approve the following lines, nor any of the sort; for to my taste they are harsh and unpleasant.