Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war, love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum.