A wet sheet and a blowing gale, A breeze that follows fast; That fills the white and swelling sail, And bends the _gallant mast_.--ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. 2. Britannia needs no bulwarks, No towers along the steep; Her march is o'er the _mountain-wave_, Her home is on the deep.--THOMAS CAMPBELL. To speak first of the term _gallant mast_. If _gallant_ mean _brave_, there are _two words_. If the words be two, there is a stronger accent on _mast_. If the accent on _mast_ be stronger, the rhyme with _fast_ is more complete; in other words, the metre favours the notion of the words being considered as _two_. _Gallant-mast_, however, is a compound word, with an especial nautical meaning. In this case the accent is stronger on _gal-_ and weaker on -mast. This, however, is not the state of things that the metre favours. The same applies to _mountain wave_. The same person who in prose would throw a stronger accent on _mount-_ and a weaker one on _wave_ (so dealing with the word as a compound), might, in poetry, the words _two_, by giving to the last syllable a parity of accent. The following quotation from Ben Jonson may be read in two ways; and the accent may vary with the reading: 1. Lay thy bow of pearl apart, And thy _silver shining_ quiver. 2. Lay thy bow of pearl apart, And thy _silver-shining_ quiver.--_Cynthia's Revels._ § 362. _On certain words wherein the fact of their being compound is obscured._--Composition is the addition of a word to a word, derivation is the addition of certain letters or syllables to a word. In a compound form each element has a separate and independent existence; in a derived form, only one of the elements has such. Now it is very possible that in an older stage of a language two words may exist, may be put together, and may so form a compound, each word having, then, a separate and independent existence. In a later stage of language, however, only one of these words may have a separate and independent existence, the other having become obsolete. In this case a compound word would take the appearance of a derived one, since but one of its elements could be exhibited as a separate and independent word. Such is the case with, amongst others, the word _bishop-ric_. In the present language the word _ric_ has no separate and independent existence. For all this, the word is a true compound, since, in Anglo-Saxon, we have the noun _ríce_ as a separate, independent word, signifying _kingdom_ or _domain_. Again, without becoming obsolete, a word may alter its form. This is the case with most of our adjectives in -ly. At present they appear derivative; their termination -ly having no separate and independent existence. The older language, however, shows that they are compounds; since -ly is nothing else than -lic, Anglo-Saxon; -lih, Old High German; -leiks, Mœso-Gothic; = _like_, or _similis_, and equally with it an independent separate word.