[470] “As soon as language proceeds, from mere articulation, to coherency, and connection, accent becomes the guide of the voice.  It is founded upon an obscure perception of symmetry, and proportion, between the different sounds that are uttered.”—­Noehden’s Grammar of the German Language, p. 66.

[471] According to Johnson, Walker, Webster, Worcester, and perhaps all other lexicographers, Quantity, in grammar, is—­“The measure of time in pronouncing a syllable.”  And, to this main idea, are conformed, so far as I know, all the different definitions ever given of it by grammarians and critics, except that which appeared in Asa Humphrey’s English Prosody, published in 1847.  In this work—­the most elaborate and the most comprehensive, though not the most accurate or consistent treatise we have on the subject—­Time and Quantity are explained separately, as being “two distinct things;” and the latter is supposed not to have regard to duration, but solely to the amount of sound given to each syllable.

This is not only a fanciful distinction, but a radical innovation—­and one which, in any view, has little to recommend it.  The author’s explanations of both time and quantity—­of their characteristics, differences, and subdivisions—­of their relations to each other, to poetic numbers, to emphasis and cadence, or to accent and non-accent—­as well as his derivation and history of “these technical terms, time and quantity”—­are hardly just or clear enough to be satisfactory.  According to his theory, “Poetic numbers are composed of long and short syllables alternately;” (page 5;) but the difference or proportion between the times of these classes of syllables he holds to be indeterminable, “because their lengths are various.”  He began with destroying the proper distinction of quantity, or time, as being either long or short, by the useless recognition of an indefinite number of “intermediate lengths;” saying of our syllables at large, “some are LONG, some SHORT, and some are of INTERMEDIATE LENGTHS; as, mat, not, con, &c. are short sounds; mate, note, cone, and grave are long.  Some of our diphthongal sounds are LONGER STILL; as, voice, noise, sound, bound, &c.  OTHERS are seen to be of INTERMEDIATE lengths.”—­Humphrey’s Prosody, p. 4.

On a scheme like this, it must evidently be impossible to determine, with any certainty, either what syllables are long and what short, or what is the difference or ratio between any two of the innumerable “lengths” of that time, or quantity, which is long, short, variously intermediate, or longer still, and again variously intermediate!  No marvel then that the ingenious author scans some lines in a manner peculiar to himself.