[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—The lines quoted by
your correspondent from The Bride of Abydos are very familiar to me. They were cited in this same connexion by Edgar Allan Poe so long ago as 1848. He pointed out that if we read the first four lines consecutively, disregarding the division into lines, we get an unbroken succession of trisyllabic feet. But he strangely failed to recognize that the " catalectie pause " after " crime " fills out this foot to equality with the others, and lets us start the next line again from an accented syllable—" Know ye the land of the cedar and vine," &c.
At this point, however, the poet changes from dissyllabic to monosyllabic rhymes, thereby throwing the mere " word- catcher, who lives on syllables," hopelessly out. It was partly on this account that I did not quote these lines, but much more because I do not in the least believe that this is how Byron meant us to read his lines. Exercising his right to begin a line from the upbeat instead of the downbeat, just as Swinburne does in the third line of Hesperia, and using fresh his power of compelling us to substitute here and there pauses for syllables, he made a metre which Is understood and enjoyed by all except the belated .critics whose one idea of scansion is to count syllables on their fingers.—I am, Sir, &c., T. S. OMOND.
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