112 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
the dangerous slippery ice"; and it has generally
been admitted that he skated with considerable
skill over the corner of the ice to which he confined
himself.
The challenge lies here: there is a common
and well-marked peculiarity in the 242 sections
that make up the first four chapters of Lamenta-
tions ; it is a rhythmical peculiarity, and yet a
rhythmical peculiarity that cannot be explained
by the parallelism. In putting it thus, I recog-
nise, as I think we well may, that parallelism
might create rhythm, and may even, as a matter
of fact, in the remote past have created the
dominant Semitic and Hebrew type of rhythm
in particular : a habit of expressing a thought
in a given number of terms, and then repeating
it by corresponding terms, would necessarily pro-
duce a certain rhythmical effect: thus, for
example, the habit of expressing thought in the
mould symbolised by
a. b. c
a'. b'. c'
would produce a rhythm which may be expressed
by 3 : 3 ; and thought expressed in a mould
symbolised by
a. b. c
a'. b'
would produce a rhythm that may be expressed
by 3 : 2.
But as soon as parallelism becomes incomplete,