"Reason, the card,, but passion, is the gale."
"From storms, a shelter,, and from heat, a shade."
The harmony is, in all these instances, improved much by the semipauses, and at the same time the sense is more clearly understood.
Considering the difficulty of reading verse, I am not surprised to find but few who are proficients in this art. A knowlege of the structure of verse, of the several kinds of feet, of the nature and use of the final, the cesural and the semicesural pauses, is essential to a graceful manner of reading poetry; and even this, without the best examples, will hardly effect the purpose. It is for this reason, that children should not be permitted to read poetry of the more difficult kind, without the best examples for them to imitate. They frequently contract, in early life, either a monotony or a sing song cant, which, when grown into a habit, is seldom ever eradicated.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] Sheridan's Art of Reading.
[126] Sheridan.
[127] Churchill has improved English versification, but was sometimes too incorrect. It is a remark of some writer, "That the greatest geniuses are seldom correct," and the remark is not without foundation. Homer, Shakespear, and Milton, were perhaps the greatest geniuses that ever lived, and they were certainly guilty of the greatest faults. Virgil and Pope were much inferior in point of genius, but excelled in accuracy. Churchill had genius, but his contempt of rules made him sometimes indulge a too great latitude of expression.