Moved through all their depths of darkness, Sighed," Farewell, O Hiawatha!

And the waves upon the margin
Rising, rippling on the pebbles,
Sobbed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha !
And the heron, the shuh-shuh-gah,
From her haunts among the fenlands,
Screamed," Farewell, O Hiawatha!"
Thus departed Hiawatha,

Hiawatha the beloved,

In the glory of the sunset,

In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest wind Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the land of the Hereafter !

XIII

IMITATIONS OF CLASSICAL METRES

Attempts have been made by several English poets to introduce the metres of the Greek and Latin languages into English verse. Sir Philip Sidney was one of the first to make the experiment; he endeavoured to substitute entirely quantity for accent, and thus accomplish a radical change in English prosody. The scholar and critic Gabriel Harvey was also most ardent in his endeavours to effect the like transformation, and induced his friend Edmund Spenser, then a young man, to make some attempts in the same direction. Their efforts resulted in verses which to an unprejudiced ear seem to have no metre at all, and are certainly destitute of harmony, as the reader may judge from the following specimens borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney.

When cedars to the ground fall down by the weight of an emmet,
Or when a rich rubie's price be the worth of a walnut,
Or to the sun for wonders seem small sparks of a candle:
Then by my high cedar, rich rubie, and only shining sun,
Vertues, riches, beauties of mine shall great be reputed.
Oh, no, no, worthy shepherd, worth can never enter a title,
Where proofs justly do teach, thus matcht, such worth to be nought

worth;

Let not a puppet abuse thy sprite, kings' crowns do not help them

ON THE STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH VERSE

From the cruel headach, nor shoes of gold do the gout heal
And precious couches full oft are shakt with a feaver.

155

His pentameters are no better; here is an example of

hem:

That the delights of life shall be to him dolorous.

William Webbe, the author of A Discourse of English Poetrie,' published in 1586, shortly after the death of Sir Philip Sidney, was.more successful. At least he did

no violence to the prosody of his own language in his translation of the first eclogue of Virgil in hexameters; he substituted accent for quantity.

The following are specimens of his work.

MELIBOEUS.

Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree,

All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunting.
We, poore soules goe to wracke, and from these coastes be
remoovèd,
And fro our pastures sweete: Thou Tityr, at ease in a shade plott,
Mak'st thicke groves to resound with songes of brave Amarillis.

O Melibus, he was no
Ever he shalbe my god

TITYRUS.

man but a god who releevde me : from this same sheepcot his alters Never a tender lambe shall want with blood to bedew them. This good gift did he give, to my steeres thus freelie to wander, And to my selfe (thou seest) on pipe to resound what I listed.

TITYRUS.

Yet thou maist tarrie here, and keepe me companie this night,
All on a leavie couch good aples ripe I do not lacke,
Chestnutts sweete good store, and plentie of curddes will I set thec.
Marke i' the towne how chimnie tops doo beginne to be smoaking,
And fro the mountains high how shaddowes grow to be larger.

Here is a distich translated by him from Ovid.

"Tis but a slender thread which all men's states do depend on : And most goodly thinges quickly doo fall to decay.

More recent poets, in trying to adapt classic metres to English verse, have, like Webbe, substituted accent for quantity, not taking the latter into account at all. Southey wrote his 'Vision of Judgment' in hexameter verse according to this system, and succeeded better than his predecessors.

The following is taken from the poem just mentioned.

'Twas at that sober hour when the light of day is receding,
And from surrounding things the hues wherewith day has adorned
them
Fade, like the hopes of youth, till the beauty of earth is departed :
Pensive, though not in thought, I stood at the window, beholding
Mountain, and lake, and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdurc;
Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection
Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror,
Under the woods reposed; the hills that, calm and majestic,
Lifted their heads in the silent sky, from far Glaramara
Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr, to Grizedal and westermost Withop.

For such hexameters to be perfect every syllable corresponding to a long syllable in Latin or Greek ought to be accented; but this is hardly possible, or if it can be done at all, can be so only by a skilful arrangement of accented monosyllables, and by the juxtaposition, when needful, of the final accented syllable of one word and the initial accented syllable of another. Southey, therefore, and others who have written hexameters, have made a free use of trochees instead of spondees. Thus, in the first verse of the passage quoted above the word sober, which forms a foot by itself, and ought to be a spondee,

is a trochee; and the fourth foot of the same verse, ligh of, is also a trochee. An accented syllable ought on no account to be allowed to come in the place of an unaccented syllable of a dactyl. Hues wherewith in the second verse is a very bad dactyl, for there is an accent on the second syllable of wherewith, which must be suppressed, not without an effort, in order that the verse may read metrically. Hexameter verses in which similar defects are frequent may be read so as to sound like real hexameters only by persons who are perfectly familiar with the metre; who know therefore on what syllables the accent ought to fall, and falsify their pronunciation in order to make the words fit. Hexameter verses based on accent ought to be so constructed that a person who pronounces English correctly must infallibly read them exactly as the metre requires, although that person should be utterly ignorant of what an hexameter verse is.

Coleridge has composed three very short poems in this metre. Here is an extract from his 'Hymn to the Earth.' Earth thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother,

Here, great mother, I lie, thy child, with his head on thy bosom!
Playful the spirits of noon, that rushing soft through thy tresses,
Green-haired goddess! refresh me; and hark! as they hurry or
linger,

Fill the pause of my harp, or sustain it with musical murmurs.
Into my being thou murmurest joy, and tenderest sadness
Shedd'st thou, like dew, on my heart, till the joy and the heavenly
sadness

Pour themselves forth from my heart in tears, and the hymn of thanksgiving.

Soft through thy, in the third verse, is a very defective dactyl. It is difficult not to accent the word through,