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What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable, who preached this as the law of a loving God.
In other respects the diction is classical and elegant, and both rhythm and language are closely modelled on those of Virgil. Licences of versification are rare. The spondaic line, rarely used by Ovid, almost discarded by Lucan, but which reappears in Statius, is sparingly employed by Valerius.
He returned angrily to his accounts. In the kitchen Vessons, very spondaic, was singing 'The Three Jolly Huntsmen. In a few minutes Hazel rose and lit a candle. She looked, as she walked to the door in her limp muslin dress, like the spectre of some unhappy creature of the past. 'Where are you going? asked Reddin. 'I thought to go to bed. 'I'm not ready. 'I'll go by my lonesome.
But as will, I think, appear later and conclusively the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried to manufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge's immortal stanza, or in text-books.
Pythagoras being in company with some wild young fellows, and perceiving that, heated with the feast, they comploted to go violate an honest house, commanded the singing wench to alter her wanton airs; and by a solemn, grave, and spondaic music, gently enchanted and laid asleep their ardour.
As he utters the last word all rise together, the old women with closed eyes, heads on one side and hands crossed over their breasts, and he begins to "line out," dividing the words rhythmically into spondaic measure, with the accent strongly on every second syllable and the falling inflection invariably on the last uttered: When I' kin read' my ti' tul clear' To man' shuns in' de skies'.
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