ENGLISH VERSE I. ACCENT AND TIME A. KINDS OF ACCENT THE accents of English syllables as appearing in verse are commonly classified in two ways: according to degree of intensity, and according to cause or significance. It Obviously there can be no fixed limits to the number of degrees of intensity recognized in syllabic accent or stress. is common to speak of three such degrees: syllables having accent (stressed), syllables having secondary accent, and syllables without accent (unstressed). Schipper makes four groups: Principal Accent (Hauptaccent or Hochton), Secondary Accent (Nebenaccent or Tiefton), No Accent (Tonlosigkeit), and Disappearance of Sound (Stummheit). In illustration he gives the ponderous, where the first syllable has the chief accent, the word last a secondary accent, the second no accent; while in the verse "Most ponderous and substantial things” the second syllable is suppressed or silent. Mr. A. J. Ellis, in like manner, recognized three principal dlasses of syllables: those stressed in the first degree, those stressed in the second degree, and those unstressed.* In the following lines from Paradise Lost he indicated these three degrees, as he recognized them, by the figures 2, 1, 0, written underneath. * Transactions of the Philological Society, 1875-76. Brought death into the world, and all our woe, Sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top * According to a more elaborate system Mr. Ellis recognized nine varieties of force or stress, which he named in order as follows: subweak, weak, superweak, submean, mean, supermean, substrong, strong, superstrong. In like manner he named nine degrees each of length, pitch, weight, and silence. Length and Silence are both terms of duration of time. The meaning of Weight has not been generally understood, nor is the term ordinarily recognized. Mr. Ellis described it as "due to expression and mental conceptions of importance, resulting partly from expression in delivery, produced by quality of tone and gliding pitch, and partly from the mental effect of the constructional predominance of conceptions." On this whole scheme of Mr. Ellis's, Mr. Mayor remarks interestingly: "Whilst I admire, I with difficulty repress a shudder at the elaborate apparatus he has provided for registering the minutest variations of metrical stress. Not only does he distinguish nine different degrees of force, but there are the same number of degrees of length, pitch, silence, and weight, making altogether forty-five varieties of stress at the disposal of the metrist. . . . If the analysis of rhythm is so terribly complicated, let us rush |