It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,—­of making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history.  Between old Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between French and English:  one fundamental in the rhythm of the languages.  I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong.  The ancient Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the Scotch and English ballads.  That means that old Latin was spoken like English is, with syllabic accent.  But Greek was not.  In that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity.  Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more occult influence in poetry than accent is.  In English, the rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where there is more than rhythm,—­where there is music,—­quantity is a very important factor.  For example, in the line

     “That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,”

you can hear how the sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line.  All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—­shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying amount of time to enounce.  I imagine the basic principle of Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel retarded the flow of tone, as in take to in the line quoted just now.

Now if you try to write a hexameter in English on the Greek principle, you get something without the least likeness either to a Greek hexameter or to music; because the language is one of stresses, not, primarily, of tones.

“This is the forest pimeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.”

will not do at all; there is no Greek spondee in it but—­rest prime—­; and Longfellow would have been surprised if you had accused that of spondeeism.  What you would get would be something like these—­I forget who was responsible for them: 

     “Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,
     After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order.”

Lines like these could never be poetry; poetry could never be couched in lines like these;—­simply because poetry is an arrangement of words upon a frame-work of music:  the poet has to hear the music within before his words can drop naturally into the places in accordance with it.  You could not imitate a French line in English, because each of the syllables would have to be equally stressed; you could not imitate an English line in French, because in that language there are none of the stresses on which an English line depends for its rhythm.