The singular beauty of the verse
analysed above is due, so far as analysis can carry us, part,
indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, but part to
this variety of scansion in the groups. The groups which,
like the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall
uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it
may so happen that we never utter one iambic foot. And yet
to this neglect of the original beat there is a limit.
'Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,' (3)
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for
though it scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the
iamb, it certainly suggests no other measure to the ear. But
begin
'Mother Athens, eye of Greece,'
or merely 'Mother Athens,' and the game is up, for the
trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of
the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat
has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric.
Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original
mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall
back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure
of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we
see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep
alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed;
to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to
balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader,
that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.
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