with Kingsley's—
"Then as a pine upon Ida when south-west winds blow landward."
In the former the dissyllabic feet are in no sense spondees; in the latter there is an effort to fill them with genuinely long syllables.
Lover whose vehement kisses on lips irresponsive are squandered,
Lover that wooest in vain Earth's imperturbable heart;
Athlete mightily frustrate, who pittest thy thews against legions,
Locked with fantastical hosts, bodiless arms of the sky;
Sea that breakest for ever, that breakest and never art broken,
Like unto thine, from of old, springeth the spirit of man,—
Nature's wooer and fighter, whose years are a suit and a wrestling,
All their hours, from his birth, hot with desire and with fray.
(William Watson: Hymn to the Sea, ii.)
Here the alternate lines represent the "pentameter" of the Latin elegiac verse, where the light syllables were omitted at the cesura and the end of the line.
When they came to the fair-flowing river and to the places
Where stood pools in plenty prepared, and water abundant
Gushed up, a cure for things manifold uncleanly, the mules were
Unyoked from the waggons, driven off to the bindweed pastures
By the rushing swirling river, and the women set about it
Unloading the waggons, carrying clothes down to the water,
One with other striving, stepping hastily into the wash-troughs.
When washing and rinsing were done, they brought the linen down
On to the sea-shore, and set it all out thereupon in rows
Where the pebbles thrown up by the waves most thickly abounded.
(William Johnson Stone: Translation of Odyssey, vi. 85 ff., in The Use of Classical Measures in English. 1899.)
Mr. Stone, like the Elizabethan classical versifiers, seeks to write purely quantitative verse in English, and, so far from aiming at the same time to preserve the rhythm of the usual English hexameter, he regards the clash between accent and quantity as a beauty rather than a defect. The verses he intends to be read "with the natural accent unimpaired," the reader listening for the regular quantities at the same time.
The views of Mr. Stone on the nature of English accent and quantity are perhaps unique among modern writers on the subject. "The ordinary unemphatic English accent is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more," as in Greek. "The accent of emphasis is something quite different in character from the ordinary accent." To those who insist that to them the second syllable of carpenter is distinctly short, Mr. Stone replies: "You are associating yourselves by such an admission with the vulgar actors of Plautus rather than the educated readers of Virgil;"—a truly terrible charge! Mr. Stone gives an interesting critical history of earlier efforts to introduce classical measures into English. His monograph is reprinted, but without the specimen translation, as the second part of the 1901 edition of Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody.