order, in such words as dandy, handy, bottle, favor, labor, it [the foot] begins with a heavy accented sound, and declines to a faint or light one at the close.  The line is thus composed of a series of swells or waves of sound, concluding and beginning alike.  The accents, or points at which the voice is most forcibly exerted in the feet, being the divisions of time, by which a part of its musical character is given to the verse, are usually made to coincide, in our language, with the accents of the words as they are spoken; which [coincidence] diminishes the musical character of our verse.  In Greek hexameters and Latin hexameters, on the contrary, this coincidence is avoided, as tending to monotony and a prosaic character.”—­Ibid.

OBS. 25.—­The passage just cited represents “accent” or “accents” not only as partly constituting quantity, but as being, in its or their turn, “the divisions of time;”—­as being also stops, pauses, or “interruptions” of sound else continuous;—­as being of two sorts, “metrical” and “prosaic,” which “usually coincide,” though it is said, they “often differ,” and their “interference” is “very frequent;”—­as being “the points” of stress “in the feet,” but not always such in “the words,” of verse;—­as striking different feet differently, “each iambic foot” on the latter syllable and every trochee on the former, yet causing, in each line, only such waves of sound as conclude and begin “alike;”—­as coinciding with the long quantities and “the prosaic accents,” in iambics and trochaics, yet not coinciding with these always;—­as giving to verse “a part of its musical character,” yet diminishing that character, by their usual coincidence with “the prose accents;”—­as being kept distinct in Latin and Greek, “the metrical” from “the prosaic” and their “coincidence avoided,” to make poetry more poetical,—­though the old prosodists, in all they say of accents, acute, grave, and circumflex, give no hint of this primary distinction!  In all this elementary teaching, there seems to be a want of a clear, steady, and consistent notion of the things spoken of.  The author’s theory led him to several strange combinations of words, some of which it is not easy, even with his whole explanation before us, to regard as other than absurd.  With a few examples of his new phraseology, Italicized by myself, I dismiss the subject:  “It frequently happens that word and verse accent fall differently.”—­P. 489.  “The verse syllables, like the verse feet, differ in the prosaic and [the] metrical reading of the line.”—­Ib. “If we read it by the prosaic syllabication, there will be no possibility of measuring the quantities.”—­Ib. “The metrical are perfectly distinct from the prosaic properties of verse.”—­Ib. “It may be called an iambic dactyl, formed by the substitution of two short for one long time in the last portion of the foot. Iambic spondees and dactyls are to be distinguished by the metrical accent falling on the last syllable.”—­P. 491.