"Dactyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... verse. Had he been so, Eustathius, an excellent critic and warm admirer of HOMER, had never affirmed, that some of his lines want a head, some a tail, and others a middle. Some begin with a word that is neither dactyl nor spondee, some conclude with a dactyl, and in the intermediate part he sometimes deviates equally from the established custom. I confess that instances of this sort are rare; but they are surely, though few, sufficient ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... be substituted for another and not make the rhythm feel irregular. So long as the accent is not changed from the first syllable to the last, or from the last to the first, there is no jar in the flow of the lines. The trochee and the dactyl are interchangeable; and the iambus ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... their trained ears so different that it can be recognized at once. The rhythms are varied by the number of beats of the right hand to one of the left, and by the different degrees of speed with which the tune is played. The general beat may be compared to the dactyl of ancient Greek and Roman versification. The left hand plays the long syllable, if we may so speak, while the right plays the two short ones. The combinations, however, are as intricate as the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... particulars, one cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to what he calls variations, he talks of the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr. Masson calls "dissyllabic variations" is common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either were ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first two short and the third long and accented; so called as the reverse of a dactyl, which has the first a long syllable, followed by two short ones. An anapaestic verse is one which only contains, or is mostly made up ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
