happy blending of long and short syllables, had long since shaken off the servile yoke of rhyme. Now, by rhythm was understood the number and respective duration of the time of which a verse was composed.[1] A long syllable was equal to a time divided in two instants, and equivalent to two short syllables. A foot was what we name today a measure. The foot contained two times, made up of two long, or of one long and two short syllables. The verse most commonly used was the hexameter, that is, that in which the extent was measured by six rhythmic feet and of which the whole duration was twelve times. Thus poetry received only the laws of rhythm; it was a kind of music whose particular harmony, free in its course, was subject only to measure.
I have never found any authentic evidence that the Greeks had ever used the rhyme in their verse. It is stated, however, that they have not differed from other nations in this respect. Voltaire said so but without proof.[2] What is most certain is that, taking the word epos,[3] a verse, in its most restricted acceptance, expressing a turn, a turning around again, the early poets constructed their verse in form of furrows, going from right to left and returning from left to right.[4] Happily this bizarrerie did not last long. If the Greek verses had thus turned one upon another, or if the rhyme had forced them to proceed in couplets bent beneath a servile yoke, Homer would not have created the Epopœia, or these frivolous obstacles would have vanished before him. His genius, incapable of enduring chains, would have refused to clothe itself in a form capable of stifling it. But this celebrated man would no doubt have changed it;
- ↑ See in the collection of Meibomius, Aristides, Quintilianus, and Les Mém. de l'Acad. des Belles-Lettres, t. v., p. 152.
- ↑ Voltaire, Dict. philos., art. RIME.
- ↑ Refer to what I have already said in last footnote p. 40.
- ↑ Fréret said that the verses of the poet Eumelus engraven upon the arch of the Cypselidæ were thus represented. Voyez sa Dissert. sur l'Art de l'Equitation. Il cite Pausanias, l. v., p. 419.
