“When the fierce | North Wind, | with his | airy | forces,
Rears up the | Baltic | to a | foaming | fury;
And the red | lightning | with a | storm of | hail comes

    Rushing a | -main down;

    How the poor | sailors | stand a | -maz’d and | tremble! 
    While the hoarse | thunder, | like a bloody | trumpet,
    Roars a loud | onset | to the | gaping | waters,
      Quick to de | -vour them.

    Such shall the | noise be, | and the | wild dis | -order,
    (If things e | -ternal | may be | like these | earthly,)
    Such the dire | terror, | when the | great Arch | -angel
      Shakes the cre | -ation.”—­Horae Lyricae, p. 67.

“These lines,” says Humphrey, who had cited the first four, “are good English Sapphics, and contain the essential traits of the original as nearly as the two languages, Greek and English, correspond to each other.  This stanza, together with the poem, from which this was taken, may stand for a model, in our English compositions.”—­Humphrey’s E. Prosody, p. 19.  This author erroneously supposed, that the trissyllabic foot, in any line of the Sapphic stanza, must occupy the second place:  and, judging of the ancient feet and quantities by what he found, or supposed he found, in the English imitations, and not by what the ancient prosodists say of them, yet knowing that the ancient and the modern Sapphics are in several respects unlike, he presented forms of scansion for both, which are not only peculiar to himself, but not well adapted to either.  “We have,” says he, “no established rule for this kind of verse, in our English compositions, which has been uniformly adhered to.  The rule for which, in Greek and Latin verse, as far as I can ascertain, was this:  = ~ | = = = | ~ ~ |= ~ | = = a trochee, a moloss, a pyrrhic, a trochee, and [a] spondee; and sometimes, occasionally, a trochee, instead of a spondee, at the end.  But as our language is not favourable to the use of the spondee and moloss, the moloss is seldom or never used in our English Sapphics; but, instead of which, some other trissyllable foot is used.  Also, instead of the spondee, a trochee is commonly used; and sometimes a trochee instead of the pyrrhic, in the third place.  As some prescribed rule, or model for imitation, may be necessary, in this case, I will cite a stanza from one of our best English poets, which may serve for a model.

’Wh=en th~e | fi=erce n=orth-w~ind, | w~ith h~is | =air~y | f=orc~es [,]
R=ears up | the B=alt~ic | t~o a | f=oaming | f=ur~y;
And th~e | r=ed l=ightn~ing | w~ith a | st=orm of | h=ail c~omes

                R=ush~ing | am=ain d=own.’—­Watts.”—­_Ib._, p. 19.

OBS. 12.—­In “the Works of George Canning,” a small book published in 1829, there is a poetical dialogue of nine stanzas, entitled, “The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder,” said to be “a burlesque on Mr. Southey’s Sapphics.”  The metre appears to be near enough like to the foregoing.  But these verses I divide, as I have divided the others, into trochees with initial dactyls.  At the commencement, the luckier party salutes the other thus:—­