certain vowels or to pass them over, as is the case in German. French,
and English, gives at the same time to the Slavic languages the
advantage of a regular quantity of their syllables, as in Greek; which
makes them better adapted than any other for imitating the old classic
metres. We must confess, however, that this matter has been hitherto
neglected in most of them, or has been treated with little
intelligence. We mean to say: Each Slavic syllable is by its very
nature either short or long; since each Slavic vowel has a twofold
duration, both short and long. This natural shortening and lengthening
of a syllable is, as with the Greeks, entirely independent of the
grammatical stress or falling of the voice upon them, or in other
words, of the _prosodic tone_; the _quantity_ being founded on the
nature of the pronunciation, on the longer or shorter duration of the
vowel itself, and not on the grammatical accent. This latter may lie
just as well on syllables prosodically short, as on those which are
long."

From these introductory remarks, we turn again to the historical part
of our essay, referring the reader back to our division of the whole
Slavic race into Eastern and Western Stems. We have, first of all,
that most remarkable Old or Church Slavonic, the language of their
Bible, now no longer a living tongue, but still the inexhaustible
source of the sublimest and holiest expressions for its younger
sisters. Then follow the _four_ languages, perfectly distinct from
each other, spoken by the Eastern Slavic nations, viz. the Russian,
Illyrico-Servian, Vindish, and Bulgarian. Three of them possess a
literature of their own; and one of them, the Illyrico-Servian, even a
double literature; for political circumstances and the influence of
the early division of the oriental and occidental churches, having
unfortunately split the nation into two parts, caused them also to