[13] Compare the sentence from Disraeli on page 24, above.
[14] Vol. i, pp. 79, 80. The musical notation must be taken as merely approximate.
[15] Experiments have been made to obtain absolute measurements of syllabic quantity, and elaborate rules formulated for determining longs and shorts. Thus far, however, the results have been very variable and unsatisfactory, and should be accepted with great caution.
[16] To adduce Greek in explanation of English pitch would be a clear case of ignotum per ignotius. But interesting parallels have been noted by Mr. Stone (in R. Bridges, Milton's Prosody, 2d ed.). "The ordinary unemphatic English accent," he says, "is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more" (p. 143); and there are similar habits in English and Greek of turning the grave accent into acute, as in to gèt money and to gét it. The Greeks recognized three degrees of pitch: the acute (high), and the grave (low), (which, according to Dionysius, differed by about the musical interval of a fifth), and midway, the circumflex. Compare thát? (acute, expressing surprise); thât? (circumflex, expressing doubt); and thàt book (grave—'book' and not 'table'). The main difference between the two languages is that so far as we can tell classical Greek had (very much like modern French) a pitch-accent and very little or no stress-accent, whereas English has both (though stress-accent preponderates).
[17] Cf. J. W. Bright, "Proper Names in Old English Verse," Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol. 14 (1899), pp. 347 ff.; especially pp. 363-365.
[18] Verrier, vol. iii, p. 229. A more ambitious attempt, from Pierson, Métrique naturelle du langage (Paris, 1884), pp. 226, 227, is given by Verrier, vol. ii, p. 14—a musical transcription of the opening verses of Racine's Athalie.
[19] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. xviii. Compare the more poetical expression of the same truth in Carlyle's Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: "Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music.... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it." (The Hero as Poet.)
[20] The first is from a poem in free-verse, Meditation, by Richard Aldington; the second is blank verse, from the Small Sweet Idyl in Tennyson's Princess; the third is from Henley's Margaritae Sorori (also in free-verse); the fourth is from DeQuincey's English Mail-Coach, Dream Fugue IV (prose); the fifth is from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ll. 1092 ff. (blank verse); the sixth is from Browning's The Ring and the Book, Bk. V (blank verse).
[21] Thomas Rudmose-Brown, "English and French Metric," in Modern Language Review, vol. 8 (1913), p. 104.
[22] A convenient collection of extracts from various writers is made by Professor R. M. Alden in Part IV of his English Verse, New York, 1903.