ts it, with 'divers delectable draughts of
example.' But the road still waits to be driven. Seeking practical
guidance--help for our present purpose--I note first that many a passage
he scans in one way may as readily be scanned in another; that when he
has finished with one and can say proudly with Wordsworth:--

I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide,

we still have a sensation of coming out (our good master with us) by that
same door wherein we went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trial
discover much profit in his table of feet--Paeons, Dochmiacs, Antispasts,
Proceleusmatics and the rest--an Antispast being but an iamb followed by
a trochee, and Proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, or four consecutive short
syllables--when I reflect that, your possible number of syllables being
as many as five to a foot, you may label them (as Aristotle would say)
until you come to infinity, where desire fails, without getting nearer
any rule of application.

Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect its
immediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever Professor
Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon English
verse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandly
enough, quoting Walt Whitman:--

I am the teacher of athletes;
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own;
He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the
teacher.

His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they
yield us small instruction in the path we seek.

It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts. Verse is written in
metre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freest
possible rhythm. That distinction seems simple enough, but it carries
consequences very far from simple. Let me give you an illustration taken
almost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of "Paradise
Regained":--

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry;
while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest
possible incident--how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seen
from the top. Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, h