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Updated: June 4, 2025
For oratory is a different thing from poetry, nor are there any two things more contrary to one another than that is to verses. But the paeon is that foot which, of all others, is least adapted to verse, on which account oratory admits it the more willingly. But Ephorus will not even admit that the spondee, which he condemns, is equivalent to the dactyl, which he approves of.
For some people think that it is the iambic rhythm, because that is the most like a speech, on which account it happens that it is most frequently employed in fables, because of its resemblance to reality because the dactylic hexameter rhythm is better suited to a lofty and magniloquent subject But Ephorus himself, an inconsiderable orator, though coming from an excellent school, inclines to the paeon, or dactyl, but avoids the spondee and trochee.
Up stood the blithe creature how neatly breeched, indeed, a heavenly forked radish and those shining riding boots! She stood there a moment and Spondee was convinced. DOROTHY GISH, said he to Dactyl. Miss Gish and her escort darted into the house, the camera man reeling busily. At an upper window of the dwelling a white-haired lady was looking out, between lace curtains, with a sort of horror.
But as to Ephorus, he did not reflect that even the spondee, which he rejects, is equal in time to his favourite dactyl; because he supposed that feet were to be measured not by the quantity, but the number of their syllables; a mistake of which he is equally guilty when he excludes the trochee, which, in time and quantity, is precisely equal to the iambic; though it is undoubtedly faulty at the end of a period, which always terminates more agreeably in a long syllable than a short one.
Homer possibly had no choice; but in the hexameter there is the greatest versative power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all life and action, without hitch or hindrance.
His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart, pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl.
Even the iambic, which consists of one short and one long syllable; or that foot which is equal to the choreus, having three short syllables, being therefore equal in time though not in the number of syllables; or the dactyl, which consists of one long and two short syllables, if it is next to the last foot, joins that foot very trippingly, if it is a choreus or a spondee.
They were for the most part the beginning of some word which reminded him of a thing he cared to remember. First he had, in sport, named some of them after the metrical feet of Latin verse, which had been but ill friends of his in his school days, and in his kennel there was a Troch, Iamb, Spond and Dact, whose full names were Trochee, Iambus, Spondee and Dactyl.
One great obstacle to your understanding of him is your having been forced to construct Latin verses, with introduction of the word 'Jupiter' always, at need, when you were at a loss for a dactyl. You always feel as if Horace only used it also when he wanted a dactyl. Get quit of that notion wholly. All immortal writers speak out of their hearts.
He would say of a mother followed by her two daughters, There is a dactyl; of a father preceded by his two sons, There is an anapæst; and of a little child walking between its grandmother and grandfather, There is an amphimacer. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school of Salerno says, "Eat little and often."
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