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through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tip-toes." Campion more gravely says that such verse is not successful because "the concurse of monosillables make (sic) our verses unapt to slide." Now Nash, when he made his comparison, was thinking of one Richard Stanyhurst's translation (Leyden, 1582: now reprinted by Arber) of four books of the Eneid into what he called hexameters, - of which Nash further remarked that it was "a foule, lumbring, boystrous, wallowing measure." Take the opening of Book II., which will make the reader quite agree with Nash :

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“Wyth tentiue lystning eeche wight was setled in harckning, Thus father Æneas chronicled from lofty bed hautye.

You me bid, O Princesse, too scarrify a festered old soare."

But there were far better specimens even at that time; thus Greene:

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Oft have I heard my lièf Còridón repórt on a lóve-day

Whèn bònny maids do méet with the swáins in the válley by Témpe."

Klopstock (to come to more modern times) chose the hexameter for the metre of his German Paradise Lost, the Messias; Goethe often used it, e.g., in Hermann und Dorothea; and, for English, Longfellow's Evangeline, Clough's Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, and (perhaps best of all) Kingsley's Andromeda, at least should make us recognize this measure as a belligerent, though some writers speak of the English hexameter as a proved failure. To these practical examples, add Mr. Arnold's critical remarks in his Essay on Translating Homer. We have no space to enter into the discussion.

But we may point out that besides the lack of spondaic effect, there is often a false accent in hexameter verse which ought to be carefully avoided thus

“In that delíghtful lánd which is wáshed by the Délaware's wáters,”

if read metrically, has an almost ludicrous effect. Better is

"Bént like a láboring oár which toíls in the súrf of the ocean."

Then, too, the pause should be varied; occasionally two pauses in a verse have a pleasant effect :

"Níght after night, when the world was asleep, as the wátchman repeated."

(g) VERSE OF SEVEN STRESSES.

This has already been noticed in the ballad measure (cf. Chapman's translation), both in its original form, and in the popular arrangement of four-and-three, whether with or without rimed pause-accents.

A verse of more than eight stresses can in nearly all cases be separated into two verses of four stresses each. Tennyson's Locksley Hall, however, is best printed as eight-stress verse: thus

"Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest" is better than

"Full of sad experience, moving

Toward the stillness of his rest."

Cf. also Poe's Raven, which has interior rime.

(h) MISCELLANEOUS.

are not confined to

Imitations of classic metres hexameter verse. The " elegiac" verse, in which "pentameter" alternated with "hexameter," has been occasionally tried by English poets, but not so much as in Germany; Coleridge's translation from Schiller is well known:

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

Tennyson has some "Alcaics" to Milton:

"O míghty-mouth'd inventor of hármonies,
O skill'd to sing of tíme or etérnity,
Gòd-gifted organ voice of England,
Mílton, a náme to resóund for áges!"

Milton himself has very gracefully Englished one of Horace's Odes (1. 5):

"What slender youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,

Pyrrha? For whom bind'st thou

In wreaths thy golden hair?"

Compare with this the exquisite Ode to Evening of Collins.

The difficult "Hendecasyllabic" verse, as used by the Roman Catullus, has been imitated by Coleridge, Tennyson, and Swinburne. The latter poet has even essayed the "Choriambic" verse:

"Lòve, what | áiled thee to leáve | lífe that was máde | lóvely, we thought | with love?

What sweet | vísions of sleép | lúred thee awáy | down from the líght above?"

Bulwer wrote a collection of stories, The Lost Tales of Miletus, all in classical metres; nor must we forget the rimeless rhythm of Southey, as in Thalaba, or of Matthew Arnold, as in The Strayed Reveller, and the highly successful choruses (with sporadic rime) of the Samson Agonistes.

But it may be said, notwithstanding these cases, that with the possible exception of the hexameter, the movement of classical metres does not harmonize with the fundamental conditions of Germanic rhythm.

CHAPTER VIII.

§ I. THE STANZA, OR STROPHE.

This is a subject which presents few difficulties; for the construction of a stanza appeals to the eye, and cannot be mistaken. A verse is the unit of every poem. Verses are combined in two ways, - either continuously, as in blank verse, the classic hexameter, and our Anglo-Saxon metre; or they may be bound together in a stanza, which in its turn goes with other stanzas to make up a poem or a division of a poem. The simplest of these combinations is the couplet, which, however, in practice is not looked on as a stanza; for the heroic couplet often has a continuous, epic effect. Next comes the triplet, which is decidedly stanzaic in effect: cf. Tennyson's Two Voices.

Strophe means literally "a turning": cf. verse. At the end of the strophe we turn, and repeat the same conditions it is "the return of the song to the melody with which it begins." Stanza, under another symbol, means the same thing. We demand for the stanza identity of structure and a close connection of statement and subject-matter. The two factors of the stanza are the Refrain and Rime. Thus Lamb's Old Familiar Faces has no rime; but the recurrence of these three words marks the end of a strophe. The Refrain, according to Wolff (Lais, Sequenzen, etc.), “probably arose from the participation of the people or congregation in songs which were sung by one or more persons on festal occasions, at church, play, or dance. The

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