apparently dislocating breaks in the poem's connection. For the rest I must entirely pass over the various intermediate phases of treatment, which fall between the extremes of the most lucid connection and most even flow on the one side, and that of the unrestrained impetuosity of passion and enthusiasm on the other. (_γ_) _Finally_, of our above three divisions of the immediate subject, we have left us to discuss the _external form_ and actual presentment of the lyric composition. Above all we shall have to deal with _metre_ and the _musical accompaniment._ (_αα_) It is obvious enough that the hexameter in its even, sustained and none the less life-like forward movement is most exceptionally fitted as the measure of the Epic. The demand of the Lyric is rather for an extreme _variety_ of metres with every kind of co-ordination in their form. The material of the lyric poem in short is not the object in the form wherein it unveils itself in Nature, but the movement of the poet's own soul, the regularity or change of which, its perturbation or repose, its peaceful flow or tumultuous wave and leap, must find expression in the time-movement of the word-length, in which such inward life is asserted. The nature of the prevailing mood and the mode of imaginative conception throughout ought to meet with an echo in the verse-measure itself. The lyric effusion indeed is placed in a far more intimate relation to time, regarded as the external medium of its communication, than the epic narrative, which consigns its phenomenal facts to the past, and associates or interweaves them under a mode of extension more analogous to that of spatial condition. The Lyric, in contrast to this, displays the momentary emergence of emotion and idea in the temporal juxta-position of their origin and elaboration. It has therefore to clothe in artistic form the varied temporal movement itself. To this distinctive character belongs, in the _first_ place, the more diverse sequence of long and short syllables in a more strongly emphasized inequality of rhythmical feet; and, _secondly_, the more varied use of the caesura verse--and _thirdly_ the rounding off of the strophes, which not only admit of abundant alternation in respect to the comparative length of particular lines, but also relatively to the rhythmic configuration of these on their own account and in their immediate sequence to each other.