her have them and taste them than talk about them. It is a
good thing to know about a lily, its scientific ins and outs, its
botany, its archaeology, even its anatomy and organic radicals; but it is
a better thing to look at the flowers themselves and to consider how
they grow."

If one reads poetry aloud he soon becomes sensible of a certain rhythm
or regular recurrence of accented syllables that gives a measured
movement to the lines. It is a recognition of this rhythm that makes a
child read in a "sing-song" tone, as natural a thing as it is to sing.
If we hear constantly repeated at frequent and regular intervals any
noise, there is a tendency to group these separate sounds and measure
them off regularly. The clock ticks with always the same force and with
the same space of time between the ticks, yet we hear _tick_-tack,
_tick_-tack; we can prove the difference to be in our ear, for it
requires but little effort to hear tick-_tack_ or _tack_-tick,
_tack_-tick. The ticking has not varied in the least.

The poet takes advantage of this rhythmical tendency of nature and by
using accented syllables at regular intervals compels us to recognize
the swing of his lines. When he reduces this to a system he has
established the _meter_ of his production. The poetical accents
sometimes fall on unaccented syllables and sometimes on monosyllabic
words that are not emphatic, but usually the metrical accent of any
given word corresponds to its logical accent. The accentuation of a
syllable tends to lengthen the time used in the pronunciation of that
syllable, and so we call it long, although the sound of its vowel may be
short. Short syllables are those which are unaccented, even though the
vowel has the long sound.

Verse appeals to the ear by its melodious combinations of sounds and
also by the regular recurrence of similar sounds in _rhymes_. These
usually occur at the ends of verses. In order that a rhyme may be
perfect the two rhyming syllables must both be accented, the vowel sound
and the consonants following must be identical, and the sounds preceding
the vowel must be different. For example, _fate_ and _late_ rhyme; _fat_
and _late_ do not; _fate_ and _lame_ do not; _debate_ rhymes with
_relate_, but not with _prelate_. Double rhymes occur frequently, as in
the words _bowlders, shoulders_.

Take this stanza from Hood's _Song of the Shirt_:

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A wo