Still another kind of relative syllable-length remains to be considered, and for metrical purposes it is probably the most important. The _accents_ of English words not only vary in degree according to the different stresses which they receive in different prose sentences, but in verse they are made artificially to vary also so as to conform as closely as possible to the scheme of the metre. Thus the first syllable of the word _over_ is accented far more strongly when it occurs at the opening of a dactylic verse, "Over the ocean wave," than when it occurs at the opening of an anapestic verse, "Over land, over sea." This being the case with accent, which tends to be strongly fixed in English words, we might naturally expect that it would be still more clearly the case with the element of time; and so it is. Syllables will be lengthened and shortened by the reader in order to preserve as nearly as possible the fundamental equal time-intervals between the principal accents. This is most easily recognized, and most commonly practised, in the case where syllables are shortened because there are more of them than the normal scheme of the verse would imply. The old "tumbling verse" of our ancestors depended on this principle, and so did the revival of it in Coleridge's _Christabel_. For example: "A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate, The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out." Here the rhythm of the last verse is brought into the four-beat measure of the first verse, by passing lightly and rapidly over all syllables save the four that mark the metre. In prose, the word _marched_ would be stressed quite as much as the word _out_, but there is no difficulty in reducing the stress in reading the verse.[54] It cannot be said, however, that there is no difficulty in reducing its _length_, for the final consonant combination _-cht_ takes up considerable time, and the whole word follows a syllable (_had_) which has been closed and so lengthened by the _d + m_. Sensitive readers would probably agree, therefore, that the quantity in this verse is too much for the smoothness of the rhythm. On the other hand, the long syllable _ironed_ helps us to fill the place of the light syllable which is missing after it, and we find the rhythm easier than it would be in this form: "The gate that was ironed both within and without." Once more, for the sake of convenience, let us attempt to put our conclusions into the form of a summary. An English syllable may be said to be _long_, not absolutely but _relatively_, from: [1. The naturally long character of its vowel-sound, due either to open quality or diphthongization.] 2. The presence of two or more consonants which require a perceptible time for utterance.