676 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have seen, both primitive and universal. From this very taste has 

 sprung the invention of meter, or the art of closely marrying the 

 words to the melody, and consequently of counting the words and 

 even the syllables of the words when they have more than one, of 

 regarding their accentuation in chanted poetry, the only form that 

 originally existed. In the primitive choirs the air was the most 

 important element ; the words were probably regulated by it. They 

 were fitted at first with much difficulty and very imperfectly, by re- 

 course to exclamations, to interjections void of sense, in order to 

 fill blanks and create rhymes. Sometimes among very inferior 

 races the rhyme and the pleasure of pronouncing it were obtained 

 by simply repeating a word or a short phrase, as the Fuegian and 

 the Australian do. Very commonly the essential element of the 

 meter is the more or less imperfect rhyme, the rhyme by asso- 

 nance. The verse without rhyme of some civilized peoples, like 

 the Greeks and Latins, which depends chiefly on the tonic accent 

 of the words, supposes a language developed and highly refined ; 

 but at bottom it also rests on combinations of assonances. The 

 primitive songs never being written, very imperfect rhymes suf- 

 ficed for them. It is only among civilized peoples that meter 

 becomes learned and complex, when poetry is almost entirely in 

 the hands of professionals. 



Usually when meter becomes more rigorous the length of the 

 verse increases. Taken by themselves long verses indicate a re- 

 fined civilization and a perfected literary aesthetics. The primitive 

 verses are nearly always short, partly because they express short 

 ideas, and partly because the desire for the repetition of agreeable 

 sounds and the taste for rhymes or what represents them are more 

 lively as man is less developed. 



In China, where metrical evolution can be followed step by 

 step, the verse in use has passed very slowly from four feet to 

 seven feet. Arabian verse has been expanded in another way 

 by combining two short verses in one ; and in a like way in the 

 French Alexandrines the hemistich is a survival of a former 

 epoch when the verse was very short. In India, Sanskrit verse, 

 uneven but generally short in the Rig Veda, has been lengthened 

 in the epics to fifteen syllables, with a hemistich. 



Poetic diction, with its music and its meter, enjoys everywhere 

 a peculiar prestige. It gives play to sesthetic impressionability, 

 and has a dignity unknown to common language. On the other 

 hand, verse easily engraves itself in the memory, and the ideas 

 which it expresses form a sort of mental fund to which a great 

 importance is attached, for the choral poetry of the primitive 

 peoples sang only of subjects especially interesting to the com- 

 munity. Hence it comes to pass in many countries that even in 

 the heart of old civilizations, far detached from their origin, the 



