With many a weary step, and many a groan,
Up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone;
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.
Who does not perceive the stone to move slowly upward, and roll violently back? But set the same numbers to another sense:
While many a merry tale, and many a song,
Cheer’d the rough road, we wish’d the rough road long.
The rough road then, returning in a round,
Mock’d our impatient steps, for all was fairy ground.
We have now, surely, lost much of the delay, and much of the rapidity.
But, to show how little the greatest master of numbers can fix the principles of representative harmony, it will be sufficient to remark that the poet, who tells us, that
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main;
when he had enjoyed, for about thirty years, the praise of Camilla’s lightness of foot, tried another experiment upon sound and time, and produced this memorable triplet:
Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestick march, and energy divine.
Here are the swiftness of the rapid race, and the march of slow-paced majesty, exhibited by the same poet in the same sequence of syllables, except that the exact prosodist will find the line of swiftness by one time longer than that of tardiness.
Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and, when real, are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected, and not to be solicited.