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So the Caliph wrote to the Viceroy of Bassorah, to send him Ibrahim bin Siyyar the prosodist, who was the first man of his day in argument and eloquence and poetry and logic, and bade him bring with him readers of the Koran and learned doctors of the law and physicians and astrologers and scientists and mathematicians and philosophers; and Ibrahim was more learned than all.
But it really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the "Psalms of Life" a masterpiece. You my learned prosodist and student of Browning and Shelley will agree with me that it is not a masterpiece.
Here are the swiftness of the rapid race, and the march of slow- paced majesty, exhibited by the same poet in the same sequence of syllables, except that the exact prosodist will find the line of SWIFTNESS by one time longer than that of TARDINESS. Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied, and, when real, are technical and nugatory, not to he rejected and not to be solicited.
It is like the secret of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a line like: Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane, can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke.
How I sympathize with you on the dull duty of a reviewer, and heartily damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist! I shall, however, wait impatiently for the articles in the "Critical Review" next month, because they are yours.
Let us apply these facts to some of the more simple of the vexed questions of prosody, No one disputes the universality of the rhythmizing impulse; the quarrel begins as soon as any prosodist attempts to dogmatize about the nature and measurement of those flowing time-intervals whose arrangement we call rhythm.
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