United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Founded upon a sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon and Nineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by the ancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was the only one whose every part was scientifically co-ordinated, and of which the fundamental conception was the natural development of all measures of superficies, of capacity, or of weight, from one single unit of length, a conception which was adopted as a starting point by the French commission of weights and measures."
There has been in France no such incessant production of new metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot and Beza.
They introduced new models of style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediæval traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer's time, which made his scansion obsolete.
For, in fact, the orations which were spoken by him had much more of boldness and confidence in them than those that he wrote. Eratosthenes says that often in his speaking he would be transported into a kind of ecstasy, and Demetrius, that he uttered the famous metrical adjuration to the people, By the earth, the springs, the rivers, and the streams, as a man inspired, and beside himself.
But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.
The united nation of the Iroquois, in numbers and valor, had become quite supreme throughout all this region. All the adjacent tribes bowed before their supremacy. In Mr. Street's metrical romance, entitled "Frontenac" he speaks, in pleasing verse, of the prowess and achievements of these formidable warriors.
He wrote poems of a very high order, some of them pub. under the pseudonyms of "George F. Preston" and "William Lancaster." They include Ballads and Metrical Sketches, The Threshold of Atrides, Glimpses of Antiquity, etc. These were followed by two dramas, Philoctetes and Orestes . Later works in his own name were Rehearsals , Searching the Net , The Soldier's Fortune, a tragedy.
The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.
It was nothing unusual for the Roman dancing-girls to throw off at the finale the upper robe and to give a dance in undress for the benefit of the public; but on the other hand in the eyes of the Roman Talma the supreme law of his art was, not the truth of nature, but symmetry. Metrical Annals
The poetry, then, is all-important in the music-drama. Wagner has rejected the forms of blank verse and rhyme as utterly unsuited to the lofty purposes of music, and has gone to the metrical principle of all the Teutonic and Slavonic poetry.
Word Of The Day