ddresses her suddenly in another measure--a longer verse, such as is
sometimes used by the Greek tragedians and comedians when something new
occurs in the play. It is called a _tetrameter_, and consists of fifteen
syllables (mostly - U, called trochees). Thus, in Greek, [Greek: oi
gerontes oi palaioi memphomestha te polei]--and in German:

Tritt hervor aus fluechtigen Wolken hohe Sonne dieses Tags--

or the fine lines spoken by Helen:

Doch es ziemet Koeniginnen, allen Menschen ziemt es wohl,
Sich zu fassen, zu ermannen, was auch drohend ueberrascht.

When Faust appears he begins to speak at once in modern blank verse of
ten syllables, such as we know in Milton and Shakespeare and Schiller.
One might have expected him to speak in some earlier romantic measure,
to have used perhaps the metre of the old Nibelungenlied, as in

Es ist in alten Maehren wunders viel geseit,
Von Heleden lobebaeren, von grosser Arebeit,

which is supposed to date from about 1150; or in Dante's _terza rima_,
of about 1300, as

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

But blank verse is after all the metre _par excellence_ of the
Renaissance, that is of the revival of Greek influence, and Goethe chose
it for this reason.

Now the Watchman Lynceus ('the keen-eyed,' as the word means--and you
perhaps remember him as the watchman of the Argonauts on the good ship
Argo) represents here the early pre-Renaissance poets of Italy and
Provence and Germany--the Troubadours and Trouveres and Minnesinger, who
were so surprised and dazzled by the sudden sunrise of the Renaissance
with its wonderful new apparition of Greek art that they (as Lynceus in
_Faust_) failed to announce its coming; and therefore Lynceus here
speaks in a kind of early Troubadour metre, with _rime_. In classical
poetry there is no rime. They did not like it; they even ridiculed it.
For instance Cicero, the great orator, once tried to write poetry, and
produced a line that said 'O fortunate Rome, when I was consul!' This
was not only conceited of him but unfortunately the line contained a
rime and this rime brought down an avalanche of ridicule on his head. 'O
fortunatam natam me consule Romam' was this unfortunate line. Rime was
probably first adopted by the monks in their medieval Latin hymns and
was used by the Troubadours and early Italian poets when they began to
write in the vulgar tongue. Dante uses it in his canzoni and sonnets
and ballads, as well