salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state which it counteracts, and how this balance of antagonists became organised into METRE (in the usual acceptation of that term) by a supervising act of the will and judgement consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argument we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First that, as the ELEMENTS of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement.
Secondly that as these elements are formed into metre ARTIFICIALLY, by a VOLUNTARY act, with the design and for the purpose of blending DELIGHT with emotion, so the traces of the VOLITION should throughout the metrical language be proportionately desecrnible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union, an interpenetration of passion and will, of SPONTANEOUS impulse and voluntary purpose. Again this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech (originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power) greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce, a more frequent employment of picturesque and vevifying language, than would be natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit COMPACT between the poet and his reader that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement.
هذا آخر تحديث كلردج عن أصل الوزن في الشعر ثم استشهد على ما قاله بشيء من مسرحية شكسبير التي اسمها قصة الشتاء ومضى من بعد يتحدث عن طبيعة تأثير أوزان الشعر وترجمة ما تقدم على وجه التقريب كما يلي، مع التنبيه على أنه مما يتعمق في العبارة ويشربها روحًا فلسفيًّا:
«أولًا من حيث منشأ الوزن. عندي أن ذلك مرده إلى توازن في العقل يحدثه بفعل منه عفويٌ يروم به أن يكبح من حدة سورة الوجدان، وبنحو من ذلك عسانا أن نفسر بسهولة الكيفية التي فيها يوجد هذا التناكر المفيد يستعين بنفس
