If I may offer a somewhat rough illustration, the works of some Eastern poets are like canoe voyages in Canada, in which the canoe now glides down a stream and is again carried overland by what are called portages to other streams or other branches of the same stream. Similarly these works have their clear streams of poetry, but every now and again their portages of prose. I may say at once that we shall find this true also of the Book of Jeremiah. All these phenomena, both of Eastern and of Western poetry, justify us in regarding with scepticism recent attempts whether to eliminate—by purely arbitrary omissions and additions, not founded on the evidence of the Manuscripts and Versions—the irregularities in the metrical portions of the Book of Jeremiah, or to confine the Prophet’s genuine Oracles to these metrical portions, and to deny that he ever passed from metre into rhythmical prose. And our scepticism becomes stronger when we observe to what different results these attempts have led, especially in the particular form or forms of metre employed. Professor Duhm, for instance, confines our prophet to one invariable form, that of the Qînah or Hebrew Elegy, each stanza of which consists of four lines of alternately _three_ and _two_ accents or beats; and by drastic and often quite arbitrary emendation of the text he removes from this every irregularity whether of defect or redundance in the separate lines.(46) On the other hand Cornill concludes that “the metrical pieces in the book are written throughout in _Oktastichs_,” or eight lines a piece, but admits (and rightly) that “in the metrical structure of the individual lines there prevails a certain freedom, due to the fact that for the prophet verse-making (_Dichten_) was not an end in itself.” While he allows, as all must, that Jeremiah frequently used the Qînah metre, he emphasises the presence of the irregular line, almost as though it were the real basis of the prophetic metre.(47) Other modern scholars by starting from other presuppositions or by employing various degrees of the textual evidence of the Versions, have reached results different from those of Duhm and Cornill.(48) But at the same time it is remarkable how much agreement prevails as to the frequent presence of the Qînah measure or its near equivalent.