given above. But if in this respect the Spanish poet has less freedom than the English versifier, he has infinitely greater liberty in the arrangement of his rhythms. The sing-song monotony of regularly recurring beats is intolerable to Latin ears. The greater flexibility of Spanish rhythm can best be shown by illustrations:

The Assy'rian came do'wn like the wo'lf on the fo'ld,

And his co'horts were gle'aming in pu'rple and go'ld;

And the she'en of their spe'ars was like sta'rs on the se'a,

When the blu'e wave rolls ni'ghtly on de'ep Galile'e.

Having chosen to write this poem in the anapestic tetrameter, Byron never varies the rhythm except to substitute an occasional iambic at the beginning of a verse:

And the're lay the ste'ed with his no'stril all wi'de.

Notice how much more freely Espronceda handles this meter in Spanish:

Su fo'rma galla'rda dibu'ja en las so'mbras

El bla'nco ropaj'e que ondea'nte se ve',

Y cua'l si pisa'ra mulli'das alfo'mbras,

Deslí'zase le've sin rui'do su pie'.

Tal vi'mos al ra'yo de la lu'na lle'na

Fugiti'va ve'la de le'jos cruza'r

Que ya' la' hinche en po'pa la bri'sa sere'na,

Que ya' la confu'nde la espu'ma del ma'r.

The first of these stanzas has the true Byronic swing. But note how freely the rhythm is handled in the second. Spanish rhythm is so flexible and free that little practical advantage is gained by counting feet. We distinguish only two sorts of verse-measure, the binary, where in general there is stress on one syllable out of two—that is there are trochees (__' __) or iambics (__ __') in the verse, or the two intermingled—and second the ternary measure, where one of a group of three syllables receives the 

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