the same time, by means of more stringent rules, created barriers
against variable accent. It was merely a question of arranging the
words in such fashion that, without forming too great a contradiction
to the common-place order of words, the way in which the accents were
placed upon them should result in a regularly alternating rise and
fall. On the whole, this principle was found to be sufficient until
the enthusiasm of the new poetic generation demanded a closer
connection between the poetic form and the variable conditions of the
soul; they found a way out of the difficulty by carrying a rhythmical
mood through a variety of metrical divisions, and thus came upon the
"free rhythms." From whatever source these were derived, either from
the misunderstood poems of Pindar, from the language of the Bible or
of the enthusiastic mystics, or from the poetic half-prose of the
pastoral poet Salomon Gessner, they were, in any case, something new
and peculiar, and their nature has not been grasped in the least
degree by the French in their "vers libres," or at any rate only since
the half-Germanic Fleming Verhaeren. They received an interesting
development through Goethe and Heinrich Heine, while most of the other
poets who made use of them, even the greatest one, Novalis, often
deteriorated either into a regular, if rhymeless, versification, or
into a pathetic, formless prose.

Another method of procuring new metrical mediums of expression for the
new wealth of emotions was to borrow. Klopstock naturalized antique
metres, or rather made them familiar to the school and to cultivated
poets, while on the other hand Heine's derision of August von Platen's
set form of verse was welcomed in many circles, and even the elevated
poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which approached the antique form,
remained foreign to the people, like the experiments of Leconte de
Lisle in France; in Italy it fared otherwise with Carducci's _Odi