closure of the
search of the human spirit for beautiful form.

[Footnote 203: I.e., China.]

Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature
on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quantitative verse was
entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in
connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations
of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy
of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress
phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality.
When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was
comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute
awareness of quantitative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was
more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the
purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade
more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to
cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful.
The dynamic basis of English is not quantity,[205] but stress, the
alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives
English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the
development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution
of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen
psychologic factor in the dynamics of French. The syllable has great
inherent sonority and does not fluctuate significantly as to quantity
and stress. Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in
French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quantitative or purely
syllabic metrics in English. French prosody was compelled to develop on
the basis of unit syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but
prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or
sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables. English
was hospitable to the French suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously
need it in its rhythmic economy. Hence rhyme has always been strictly
subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative feature and has been
frequently dispensed with. It is no psychologic accident that rhyme came
later into English than in French and is leaving it sooner.[206] Chinese
verse has developed along very much the same lines as French verse. The
syllable is an even more integral and sonorous unit than