3. Prolongation by the speaker (_a_) because of the importance of the syllable, or (_b_) because of the time which it ought to occupy in the scheme of the verse. The artificial lengthening and shortening of syllables, then, is constantly and naturally practised in the reading of verse which has a strong lyrical swing such as guides the reader into a sense of its structure. In verse more subtle and less lyrical in character the time-intervals are not so strongly marked, and by the ear not trained to listen for rhythm they are not so easily observed. The five-stress iambic line, especially when unrimed, has developed far more freedom and subtlety in English poetry than any other measure, and it is to this that one finds these writers invariably turning who wish to prove that our verse is not based on regular time-intervals. A verse like this: "The lone couch of his everlasting sleep," if read as an ordinary prose phrase, has no obvious metrical character. The second foot ("couch of") inverts the normal order of accent and no-accent, and in common speech the second and third syllables would be long and followed by a phrase-pause, while the fourth and fifth syllables would be made very short and jointed closely to what follows. There is no rhythm in such a group of words. But when we know that they are part of a poem in five-stress verse, we can readjust them so as to approach more closely to the rhythmical scheme in our minds. We cannot accent either _of_ or _his_, without destroying the sense; nor can we deprive either _lone_ or _couch_ of its accent; but we can _lengthen_ the words _of his_ beyond their natural time in speech, pronouncing them more deliberately, and we can also, perhaps, diminish the phrase-pause after _couch_. This would tend to equalize the five time-intervals to which the verse, as a verse, should fit itself. It would be too much to say that this is what the ordinary reader would do, because the ordinary reader is likely to have his mind fixed on expressing the sense, neglecting the rhythm which is equally an element of the poetry; but it is what the careful reader could do without difficulty. The first line of _Paradise Lost_, "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit,"