(I must
again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be
adapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on
English metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think
"stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect
English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the
woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines--heroic lines
with a difference--as report the short-breathed messenger's reply to
Althea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died:
A maiden's and a prophet's and thy son's.
It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should have
made a trick and a manner of that most energetic device of his by which
he leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and on
to the first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, as
though a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It is in the same boar
hunt:
And fiery with invasive eyes,
And bristling with intolerable hair,
Plunged;--
Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine
narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a
counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers. It is
even too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to out-run the
province of words, somewhat as that did the province of notes.
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