its own beauties, and the more compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too.  There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are languages.  Most of these are merely potential, awaiting the hand of artists who will never come.  And yet in the recorded texts of primitive tradition and song there are many passages of unique vigor and beauty.  The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts that impresses us as a stylistic discovery.  Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems.  We must be careful not to exaggerate a freshness of content that is at least half due to our freshness of approach, but the possibility is indicated none the less of utterly alien literary styles, each distinctive with its disclosure of the search of the human spirit for beautiful form.

[Footnote 203:  I.e., China.]

Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry.  Quantitative verse was entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy of the language.  The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality.  When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute awareness of quantitative distinctions.  However, the Latin accent was more markedly stressed than that of Greek.  Probably, therefore, the purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade more artificial than in the language of their origin.  The attempt to cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful.  The dynamic basis of English is not quantity,[205] but stress, the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables.  This fact gives English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution of new forms.  Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen psychologic factor in the dynamics of French.  The syllable has great inherent sonority and does not fluctuate significantly as to quantity and stress.  Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quantitative or purely syllabic metrics in English.  French prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit syllable-groups.  Assonance, later rhyme, could not but prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables.  English was hospitable to the French suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously need it in its rhythmic economy.  Hence rhyme has always been strictly subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative feature and has been frequently dispensed