The vocal execution of Hawaiian music, like the recitation of much of their poetry, showed a surprising mastery of a certain kind of technique, the peculiarity of which was a sustained and continuous outpouring of the breath to the end of a certain period, when the lungs again drank their fill. This seems to have been an inheritance from the old religious style of prayer-recitation, which required the priest to repeat the whole incantation to its finish with the outpour of one lungful of breath. Satisfactory utterance of those old prayer-songs of the Aryans, the _mantras_, was conditioned likewise on its being a one-breath performance. A logical analogy may be seen between all this and that unwritten law, or superstition, which made it imperative for the heroes and demigods, _kupua_, of Hawaii’s mythologic age to discontinue any unfinished work on the coming of daylight.[305] [Footnote 305: The author can see no reason for supposing that this prolonged utterance had anything to do with that Hindoo practice belonging to the _yoga_, the exercise of which consists in regulating the breath.] [Page 140] When one listens for the first time to the musical utterance of a Hawaiian poem, it may seem only a monotonous onflow of sounds faintly punctuated by the primary rhythm that belongs to accent, but lacking those milestones of secondary rhythm which set a period to such broader divisions as distinguish rhetorical and musical phrasing. Further attention will correct this impression and show that the Hawaiians paid strict attention not only to the lesser rhythm which deals with the time and accent of the syllable, but also to that more comprehensive form which puts a limit to the verse.