guidance--help for our present purpose--I note first that many a passage
he scans in one way may as readily be scanned in another; that when he
has finished with one and can say proudly with Wordsworth:--

I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide,

we still have a sensation of coming out (our good master with us) by that
same door wherein we went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trial
discover much profit in his table of feet--Paeons, Dochmiacs, Antispasts,
Proceleusmatics and the rest--an Antispast being but an iamb followed by
a trochee, and Proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, or four consecutive short
syllables--when I reflect that, your possible number of syllables being
as many as five to a foot, you may label them (as Aristotle would say)
until you come to infinity, where desire fails, without getting nearer
any rule of application.

Let us respect a genuine effort of learning, though we may not detect its
immediate profit. In particular let us respect whatever Professor
Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid work upon English
verse-prosody. I daresay he would retort upon my impatience grandly
enough, quoting Walt Whitman:--

I am the teacher of athletes;
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own;
He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the
teacher.

His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they