SPEECH-WAVES. In English, accent plays a very important part; and for this reason, we may consider English speech as consisting of a succession of utterances which form, as it were, speech-waves, in which each wave or jet of breath contains a strong syllable; and this strong syllable may either stand alone, or may be preceded or followed by a weak syllable, or may even be both preceded and followed by a weak syllable during the emission of the same jet of breath[71]. Thus each jet of breath, due to a slight impulse emitting inhaled air, may be denoted by -, or by v -, or by - v, or by v - v. That is, the words _light_, _alight_, _lighted_, _alighted_ can all be produced in a single speech-wave. But if a word has _two_ accents, it requires two impulses to utter it, and really contains two speech-waves. Such words are extremely common; as _c['o]nque-r[`o]r_, _am['a]l-gam[`a]te_, &c.; and many English words require _three_ speech-waves, as _ins[`o]l-ub['i]li-t[`y]_; or even _four_, as _[`i]n-comb[`u]sti-b['i]li-t[`y]_. s. 101. Here comes in the distinction between prose and verse. It is equally easy to describe the accentual structure of either; and it is readily perceived that, in prose, the speech-waves succeed each other so that there is, usually, no perceptible regularity in the distribution of strong and weak syllables; but, in verse, we expect them to be distributed in a manner sufficiently regular for the ear to recognise some law of recurrence, and to expect it. An extremely regular line occurs in Goldsmith's Deserted Village:-- And-f['o]ols, who-c['a]me to-sc['o]ff, rem['a]ined to-pr['a]y. This obviously consists of five consecutive iambs, and may be denoted by: v - . v - . v - . v - . v -. Here the dot (.) is introduced to shew precisely where the natural pause in the voice, or the separation of the speech-waves, occurs. It is usual, in books of prosody, to introduce a bar instead of a dot, and thus to break up the line into bits of equal length, and to exhibit the result as the Procrustean formula to which all lines of five accents should be reduced. There is little to be learnt from this wooden method, which amounts to little more than leaving the reader to find out the scansion for himself as he best may; for few lines really conform to it.