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I should have described him more briefly as a 'master-builder, had my ear been able to endure a sentence ending with two consecutive trochees, and each of those trochees ending with the same syllable er. Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in the evasion of cacophon.
The reason why these were adopted only in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin than the epic dactyls. But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed.
Standing on his head there, he galloped backwards, forwards, and sideways in all sorts of extraordinary curves and ups and downs, his feet meanwhile playing trochees, dactyls, pyrrhics, &c., in the air.
If, for instance, the poem shows accented followed by unaccented syllables or trochees as the prevalent foot, the first "mode" is indicated as providing the principle to be followed in transposing the Gregorian to modern notation. When these conditions are reversed the iambic foot will prevail and the melody will be in the second mode.
The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in Bacchanalia "Ah! so the silence was, So was the hush;" the honey-dropping trochees of the New Sirens; the description of the poet in Resignation; the outburst "What voices are these on the clear night air?"
Certainly those sun-burnt "doughboys" were not bothering themselves about trochees and iambi and such toys of cultivated "literary" persons; they were amusing themselves on the march by inventing words to fit the "goose-step." Their Unus homo mille mille mille decollavimus "Hay-foot, straw-foot, belly full of bean-soup Hep Hep!"
Our dissyllables are for the most part, either iambics, as desire; or trochees, as languid. These therefore, but chiefly the latter, we must admit, instead of spondees.
How could he hide his fondness for his cigar, and his night-cap, his predilection for burlesque shows and boxing bouts and blonde stenographers? It was difficult enough, even now, and he had eaten enough trochees and coffee beans to sink a frigate, and he had been able only once to get away to New York "to clean up his affairs."
In connexion with this character I would have the student note that I have introduced into the dog's part just before the curtain a whole line of dactyls. I hope the hint will not be wasted. Such exceptions relieve the monotony of our English trochees.
The reason why these were adopted only in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin than the epic dactyls. But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed.
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