136 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
Or (3) is balance due to equality in the number
of stressed or accented words or syllables in the
two lines, echo to the presence of a greater number
of stressed syllables in the first line, and a smaller
number in the second? If so, is there no limit
to the number of unstressed syllables that each
stressed syllable can carry with it? If there is a
limit, what is it? Is it no wider than in Christa-
bel? or is it as wide as, or wider than, in Anglo-
Saxon poetry?
Of these three possibilities, the first two seem
to me to have been ruled out in the course of
discussion and investigation concerning Hebrew
metre. I confine myself to some discussion of
the third.
It is just possible that some of the ancients
had analysed the laws of Hebrew poetry suffi-
ciently to detect the essential character of the
stressed syllables. The interesting suggestion
has been thrown out^1 that the author of Wisdom,
who certainly attempted to naturalise parallelism
in Greek, also attempted a new Greek rhythm
on the model of the Hebrew by making the
parallel periods in Greek contain the same
number of accented syllables. Then, again, in
the opinion of some the difficult passage in Origen
which refers to the subject of Hebrew metre
implies an appreciation of the stressed syllables.^2
1 Encyclopaedia Biblica, col. 5344.
2 Origen's scholion has already been cited above, p. 12 n. The
subject of the scholion is Psalm cxix. 1—