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But where, during the days when the vociferous cuckoo, with hoarse chuckle and dissyllabic call and wild bubbling cry was so much with us where, in this period of many pleasant noises was the cuckoo's mate, or maid, or messenger, the quaint and beautiful wryneck?
It goes about in small flocks and constantly utters a loud plaintive dissyllabic note. Its plumage is speckled black and white, like that of a Hamburg fowl. It feeds entirely on fish, and frequents the larger hill streams. Its habit is to squat on a branch, or if the day be cloudy, on a boulder in mid-stream, whence it dives into the water after its quarry.
DIS: the spellings diis, dii which many recent editors still keep, are probably incorrect, at all events it is certain that the nominative and ablative plural of deus formed monosyllables, except occasionally in poetry, where dei, deis were used. Even these dissyllabic forms scarcely occur before Ovid. ET: emphatic at the beginning of a sentence: 'aye, and'. MELIUS: sc. dixit.
Sometimes one of them would miss one note of his dissyllabic song, and at times the refrains were repeated in a leisurely way, at times in quick succession; but the performers never sang simultaneously, each waiting until his fellow minstrel had given his reply.
The dangerous repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, tired," &c., come all right; and above all he has the flexibility and quiver of metre that he too often lacks. His trisyllabic interspersions the leap in the vein that makes iambic verse alive and passionate are as happy as they can be, and the relapse into the uniform dissyllabic gives just the right contrast.
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