"I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand."
Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write "hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here "hanging," so as to make it read:
"I hastily put my hat upon my head, And rushed forth into the Strand, And there I encountered another man, Whose hat was hanging in his hand."
Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's, ___ ___ __ ____ I put | my hat | up-on | my head |[**Diacritical marks]
--by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not _destroyed_ the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon my head," unchanged; but we have merely _added_ brief rhythms, namely that of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or logaoedic dactyl (hastily)[**Symbols above hastily]; that is to say, instead now of leaving our first line _all_ iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a spondee--rushed forth--_varies_ the rhythm by this spondaic intervention, but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So, of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its own rhythm--for an English tongue always gives these words with definite time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms, we have added to them. We have not made it _formless_, we have made it contain _more forms_.
Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse is _not_ the relation of the _formless_ to the _formal_: it is the relation of _more forms_ to _fewer forms_. It is this relation which makes prose a _freer_ form than verse.