"Hexameter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hope that he would give them importance by answering them. But the reader will in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacNicol or Henderson. One Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... familiar letters" which passed between Spenser and himself, and the "four letters and certain sonnets," containing valuable notices of contemporary poets. He also prefixed a poem entitled Hobbinol, to the Faery Queene. But Harvey most deserves our notice because he was the champion of the hexameter verse in English, and imbued even Spenser ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... this kind have perished; and the first extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C., devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... were rude dialogues, in which the country people assailed and ridiculed one another in extempore verses, and which were introduced as an amusement in various festivals. They were formed into the Satire[75] by C. LUCILIUS, who wrote in hexameter verse, and attacked the follies and vices both of distinguished persons and of mankind in general. He was born B.C. 148, at Suessa Aurunca, and died at Naples in B.C. 103. He lived upon terms of intimacy with the younger Scipio and Laelius, and was the maternal ancestor of Pompey ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... remarkable for his terseness than for his ease: the tendency of the octosyllabic metre in its colloquial form is to become slipshod, interminable, in a word unclassical. Again, few of those who use it apply it consistently to all Horace's hexameter poems: most make a distinction, applying it to some and not to others. In point of fact, however, it does not seem that any such distinction can be made. Horace's lightest Satires or Epistles have generally something grave about them: his gravest ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... objected Gringoire; "I shall break my neck. Your stool limps like one of Martial's distiches; it has one hexameter leg and one ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... 'flay.' 'Satire,' again, has an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, and acquired the notion of a poem 'directed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... TITE etc.: the lines are a quotation from the Annales of Q. Ennius (born at Rudiae in Calabria 239 B.C., died 169), an epic poem in hexameter verse, the first great Latin poem in that metre, celebrating the achievements of the Roman nation from the time of Aeneas to the poet's own days. The incident alluded to in Ennius' verses is evidently the same as that narrated by Livy 32, cc. 9, 10. Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... A MS. from Saint Martial de Limoges contains this passage (Paris, Bibl. Nat., No. 2400.) "Adrian II., after the example of his predecessor of the same name, completed the Gregorian Antiphoner in several places. He also arranged a second prologue in hexameter verse to be chanted at High Mass on the first day of Advent. This prologue begins in the same way as another very short one composed by the first Adrian to be sung at all the Masses of this first Sunday in Advent, but that of Adrian ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... list of biographers has sometimes been counted a poem in hexameter verse[68] the text of which was edited in ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... enormous bow. The heavy curls of his hair had come unbound and fell over his flushed face. When he hit one of the Imperial soldiers his father applauded him eagerly; then, collecting all his strength, flung another lance, chanting a hexameter or a verse of an ode. Herse crouched half hidden behind a sacrificial stone which lay at the top of the hastily-constructed rampart, and handed weapons to the combatants as they needed them. Her dress was torn and blood-stained, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... twelve books, of which the first six describe the wanderings of Aeneas, and the last six his wars in Italy. Its metre is the dactyllic hexameter. ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of final s in scanning is extremely frequent. Cf. such a line as this hexameter from Ennius, where the s ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... call heroic consists of no more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for example, this verse ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... probably, because from the beginning, to the third verse of the third chapter, where the complaint of Job beginneth, the Hebrew is (as St. Jerome testifies) in prose; and from thence to the sixt verse of the last chapter in Hexameter Verses; and the rest of that chapter again in prose. So that the dispute is all in verse; and the prose is added, but as a Preface in the beginning, and an Epilogue in the end. But Verse is no usuall ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... An hexameter verse consists of six feet. As the ancient heroes were at least six feet high, this is probably the reason why it is ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... superiority. above three or four colleagues who would have shamed him at an examination, and who uttered many a curse because they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter. He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let them know that he considered himself above them. His reading was desultory; in fact, everything he did was desultory. He was not selfish in the ordinary ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... following order. In the summer of 1817 Southey, accompanied by his friends, Humphrey Senhouse and the artist Edward Nash, passed some weeks (July) in Switzerland. They visited Chamouni, and at Montanvert, in the travellers' album, they found, in Shelley's handwriting, a Greek hexameter verse, in which he affirmed that he was an "atheist," together with an indignant comment ("fool!" also in Greek) superadded in an unknown hand (see Life of Shelley, by E. Dowden, 1886, ii. 30, note). Southey copied this entry into his note-book, and "spoke of the circumstance ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Man of), Homer, who lived at Chios [Ki'.os]. At least Chios was one of the seven cities which laid claim to the bard, according to the Latin hexameter verse: ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... all) as at Stonehenge. En passant—this tossing was a pastime replete with the sublime and awful. That their efforts might be simultaneous, those who held the blanket, and they were legion, made use of the following neat hexameter: ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... maiden's consent as well as her father's (who was an artist) he forsook his trade, devoted himself to painting, and became a great master in his art. On the tombstone which his admirers placed on his grave a hundred years after his death, stands the Latin hexameter: ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even that ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wild manner the queries which the priest will put in behalf of the supplicants. Her incoherent words are very hard to understand, but the priest duly "interprets" them, i.e. gives them to the suppliant in the form of hexameter verses. Sometimes the meaning of these verses is perfectly clear. Very often they are truly "Delphic," with a most dubious meaning—as in that oft-quoted instance, when the Pythia told Croesus if he went to war with Cyrus, "he would ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... stanza, invented by Edmund Spenser and employed by him in the "Faerie Queene," is a difficult but effective form of poetry. It consists of nine verses, the first eight being iambic pentameter, and the ninth line iambic hexameter, or Alexandrine. Its rhyme scheme is a b a b b c b c c. The following from Byron's "Childe ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... recommend; and Walt Whitman, the {6} great poet of democracy; "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," by De Quincey, good in its way; G. Eliot and Mrs. Browning, &c., &c. Perhaps you would like some of those. I read Chas. Kingsley's "Andromeda"—it is really a splendid rhythmical piece of hexameter—and some of his Life. I rather like pieces of his poetry, and the one ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... own works in complete or nearly complete form his military memoirs only. His specifically literary works have all perished. A few sentences from his speeches, a few of his letters, a few wise or witty sayings, an anecdote or two scattered about in the pages of other authors, and six lines of hexameter verse, containing a critical estimate of the dramatist Terence, are all that remain as specimens of what is probably forever lost ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that ever was written. You fancy that you hear the people talking. For a contrary reason, no college-man writes a good style, or understands it when written. Fine writing is with him all verbiage and monotony—a translation into classical centos or hexameter lines. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Pausanias, viz., that in the second century B.C. the Muses from Parnassus aided the combined Greek armies against the destructive invasion of the Gauls by provoking a panic among the latter. I actually began my heroic poem in hexameter verse, but could not get through ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the Duke, shaking his head. "Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis." No doubt, he thought, that as his son was at Oxford, admonitions in Latin would serve him better than in his native tongue. But Gerald, when he heard the grand hexameter rolled out in his father's grandest tone, entertained a comfortable feeling that the worst of the interview was over. "Win back what you had lost! Do you think that that is the common fortune of young gamblers when they fall among those who ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the Rime equivoquee. From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... war. It would seem that the extraordinary series of performances ordered during the depression and despair that followed Cannae had succeeded for the time in quieting the religio. Fabius Pictor too had returned from Delphi,[690] and brought home in what seems to be hexameter verse instructions as to the worship of certain deities, with injunctions to the Romans to send gifts to the Pythian Apollo if prosperity should return to them, and ending with the significant words, "lasciviam (disorderly excitement) a vobis prohibete," which may be interpreted ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... faltered, nor suffered others about him to falter,—Themistocles. The people heard him gladly—he would never talk of defeat. He had a thousand reasons why the invader should be baffled, from a convenient hexameter in old Bacis's oracle book, up to the fact that the Greeks used the longest spears. If he found it weary work looking the crowding peril in the face and smiling still, he never confessed it. His friends would marvel at his serenity. Only when they saw him sit silent, saw his brows knit, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... take the Nibelungenlied, [Footnote: See chapter on the Nibelungenlied in Homer AND the Epic, pp. 382- 404.] we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... maturity rest upon her look and figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all hours,—now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the glorious ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... the first three letters "Deo Optimo Maximo," and says the subsequent line contains the initials of the following hexameter: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... more striking from the medieval form of the verse in which it is set forth. There are many works of this and the following centuries, in which a careful imitation of the antique appears both in the hexameter and pentameter of the meter and in the classical, often myth- ological, character of the subject, and which yet have not anything like the same spirit of antiquity about them. In the hexametric chronicles ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... for her: her mixed repertory ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d'Annunzio to Dumas fils, from Bernard Shaw to the latest Parisian playwrights. Upon occasion she would even venture into the Versailles' avenues of the classic hexameter, or on to the deluge of images of Shakespeare. But she was ill at ease in that galley, and her audience was even more so. Whatever she played, she played herself, nothing but herself, always. It was ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Alexandrian line consists of twelve syllables (iambic hexameter). Neither the acrostic nor the Alexandrine has the property assigned to it here. A palindrame reads the same forward as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... after all, would probably turn out to be made of German silver—faugh!—we not only defy the fiend and his temptations generally, but we spit in his face for such an insinuation. With respect to the pretty toy model of Hexameter and Pentameter from Schiller, we believe the case to have arisen thus: in talking of metre, and illustrating it (as Coleridge often did at tea-tables) from Homer, and then from the innumerable wooden and cast-iron imitations of it among the Germans—he would be very likely ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the mediaeval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that out of this ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Homer have the most perfect metre, the hexameter, which is also called heroic. It is called hexameter because each line has six feet: one of these is of two long syllables, called spondee; the other, of three syllables, one long and two short, which is called dactyl. Both are isochronic. These in interchangeable order fill out ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... thought it a very sonorous hexameter. I did not tell him, it was not in the Virgilian style. He much regretted that his FIRST tutor was dead; for whom he seemed to retain the greatest regard. He said, "I once had been a whole morning sliding in Christ-Church ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... were the artificial modes employed by cultivated writers. However this may be, there is no doubt that, together with the decline of antique civilisation, accent and rhythm began to displace quantity and metre in Latin versification. Quantitative measures, like the Sapphic and Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... metre admits of keeping the right medium between the dignified, almost prancing hexameter, and the shorter metres of the lyrics. Its feet are nimble and fleet, but yet full of vigor and expressiveness. In addition, the Kalevala uses alliteration, and thus varies the rhythm of time with the rhythm of sound. This metre is especially fit for the numerous expressions ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... likeness in kind? Is it too bold, is it merely fanciful, Eusebius, to say, too, that there is a something not dissimilar in the measures adopted by these ancient and modern poets. Homer possibly had no choice; but in the hexameter there is the greatest versative power. How different, for instance, are the first lines of the "Tale of Troy Divine," and the more familiar adventures of Ulysses. The ad libitum alternation of dactyl and spondee make the lively or the grave; and the whole metrical glow is all ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Properties and Effects of the Electrical Matter and the Means of preserving Buildings, Ships, etc., from Lightning, in 1751, and in June, 1752, "the immortal kite was flown." It was in 1781, when he was minister plenipotentiary at the Court of France, that the Latin hexameter, "Eripuit c[oe]lo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis," first applied to him by Turgot, was affixed to his portrait by Fragonard. The line, said to be an adaptation of a line in the Astronomicon of Manilius (lib. i. 104), descriptive of the Reason, "Eripuitque Jovi fulmen viresque ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but at its springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough in joy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single form quite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded from the current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexible measure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate every emotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without once disavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less fertile ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... poem in hexameter verse, in good Greek, addressed to King Ptolemy, in which he calls, not only upon Apollo and the Muse, but, like a true Egyptian, upon Hermes, from whose darkly worded writings he had gained his knowledge. He says that the king's ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... with his clergy he was the most imposing and sacerdotal of bishops; but in private life none knew better how to disguise his cloth. He was moreover a man of parts, and from the construction of a Latin hexameter to the growing of a Holland bulb, had a word worth hearing on all subjects likely to engage the dilettante. A liking soon sprang up between Odo and this versatile prelate; and in the retirement of his lordship's cabinet, or pacing with him the garden-alleys set with ancient marbles, the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... life with its simple scenes; but four years have passed, and they have never been there again, and I dare say never will; but when Viscount Ipsden falls in with a brother aristocrat who is crushed by the fiend ennui, he remembers Aberford, and condenses his famous recipe into a two-edged hexameter, which will make my learned reader laugh, for it is ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... Hyperion and Kavanagh, and a few dramas, all of which deserve to rank with the best American productions. Evangeline is considered "to be the most perfect specimen of the rhythm and melody of the English hexameter." He died at Cambridge, Mass., March ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... northern latitudes, the scenery of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the bayous and cypress forests of the South, the mocking-bird, the prairie, the Ozark hills, the Catholic missions, and the wild Arabs of the West, roaming with the buffalo along the banks of the Nebraska. The hexameter measure he has chosen has the advantage of a prosaic freedom of expression, exceedingly well adapted to a descriptive and narrative poem; yet we are constrained to think that the story of Evangeline would have been quite as acceptable to the public taste ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or from others had received the title—Peri physeos (De Natura Rerum) that Parmenides set forth his ideas. From the writings of Clement of Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern scholarship has collected fragments ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... artist's blood with horror, and keeps him away from church. The artist too, to whom we might look for help, is the rara avis in terris, and, in regard to his sympathy with the clergy, would often be thought by them to deserve the rest of the hexameter; but it is really to his credit that he is loth to meddle with church music. Its social vexations, its eye to the market, its truckling to vulgar taste and ready subservience to a dominant fashion, which can never (except under the rarest combination of circumstances) be good;—all this is more ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... persistency still; Deduct all you can, that still keeps you at bay; Why, he'll live till men weary of Collins and Gray. I'm not over-fond of Greek metres in English, To me rhyme's a gain, so it be not too jinglish, And your modern hexameter verses are no more Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer; 1320 As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is, So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes; I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o't is That I've heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with never having produced "a whole," have certainly forgotten one of his works,—"The Wisdom of the Brahmin, a Didactic Poem, in Fragments." The title somewhat describes its character. The "fragments" are couplets, in iambic hexameter, each one generally complete in itself, yet grouped in sections by some connecting thought, after the manner of the stanzas of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." There are more than six thousand couplets, in all, divided into twenty books,—the whole forming a mass of poetic wisdom, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... general determination that he could do a great deal if he chose. "Ah, if Pendennis of Boniface would but try," the men said, "he might do anything." He was backed for the Greek Ode won by Smith of Trinity; everybody was sure he would have the Latin hexameter prize which Brown of St. John's, however, carried off, and in this way one university honour after another was lost by him, until, after two or three failures, Mr. Pen ceased to compete. But he got a declamation ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said to the others, 'has miraculously been able to put the whole meaning of the seven thousand lines of Greek invocation into one English hexameter—a little ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... bard—and not during the chant itself. For whatever melody this chant possessed, it depended entirely upon the raising and lowering of the voice according to the accent of the words and the dramatic feeling of the narrative. For its rhythm it depended upon that of the hexameter, which consists of a line of six dactyls and spondees, the line always ending with a spondee. Really the line should end with a dactyl ([- ' ']) and a spondee ([- -]). If a line ends with two spondees ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... [short-short-long], the Trochee [long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long]. Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four, a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the time ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the name assigned to the hexameter poem commencing, "Papa stupor mundi," inscribed, about the year 1200, to the reigning Pope, Innocent III., by Galfridus de Vino salvo. Of this work several manuscript copies are to be met with in England. I will refer only to two in the Bodleian, Laud. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... may be referred to the poem of The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral, by Arthur Hugh Clough, Oxford: Macpherson, 1848. The action of the poem is chiefly carried on at the Bothie, the situation of which is thus described (in hexameter verse): ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... possibility of a clear and simple rendering of the original. Upon the other hand, though we may get Homer's meaning, we often miss his music. The ten-syllabled line brings but a faint echo of the long roll of the Homeric hexameter, its rapid movement and continuous harmony. Besides, except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon's use of the weak ending, his habit of closing the line with ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... twice; but Everard asked me nothing but what I knew; and now and then I get into a funny state, when nothing is too hard for me, and that was how it was yesterday evening. Generally, I feel as dull as a post," said Norman, yawning and stretching; "I could not make a nonsense hexameter this minute, if I ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of avatar of Lucan, dominates the fourth century with the terrible clarion of his verses: a poet forging a loud and sonorous hexameter, striking the epithet with a sharp blow amid sheaves of sparks, achieving a certain grandeur which fills his work with a powerful breath. In the Occidental Empire tottering more and more in the perpetual menace of the Barbarians now pressing in hordes at the Empire's yielding ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... swim over." This passage is an absolute abridgment of many chapters of Carpini. Still more terse was the sketch of Mongol proceedings drawn by a fugitive from Bokhara after Chinghiz's devastations there. It was set forth in one unconscious hexameter: ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the monosyllable, rhyme, comprehends pretty nearly all that the world at large intends by poetry; and, in the same manner as certain critics have sneered at Livy—no, it was Tacitus—for commencing his work with a bad hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn a whole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of harbouring a distich. But poetry, friend World, means far other than rhyme; its etymology would yield "creation," or "fabrication," of sense as well as sound, and of melody for the eye ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One knows—at least every schoolboy has known—that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets; that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit even more than ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... one of the seven cities which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. Hence he is sometimes called "Scio's Blind Old Bard." The seven cities referred to make an hexameter verse: ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 13, p. 203.) asks, "Is there any published edition of the hexameter poem by Lactantius, which is said to have suggested the idea of the Anglo-Saxon Lay of the Phoenix?" This poem is not in hexameter, but in elegiac verse; and though, on account of its brevity, we could not expect that it would have been separately published, it ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... difference to me whether or not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It is merely a matter of how the great dynamic ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Still a famous place of public resort and entertainment. On the wall are two old paintings of Faust's carousal and his ride out of the door on a cask. One is accompanied by the following inscription, being two lines (Hexameter and ...
— Faust • Goethe
... and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... scene before us spread Where Freedom's full hexameter began— Restore our Epic, which the Nations read As far its ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo^, meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ictus. elegiacs &c adj.; elegiac verse, elegaic meter, elegaic poetry. poet, poet laureate; laureate; bard, lyrist^, scald, skald^, troubadour, trouvere [Fr.]; minstrel; minnesinger, meistersinger [G.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for the preservation of history, such as existed anciently in Ireland. These verses were sung by boys more patrum (Od. iv. 15), for the entertainment of guests. Ennius, who composed his Annales in hexameter verse, introducing, for the first time, the Greek metre into Roman literature, mentions the verses which the Fauns, or religious poets, used to chant. Scaliger thinks that the Fauns were a class of men who exercised in Latium, at a very remote period, the same functions ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... radicalism, that here and there appears;(46) his singing the praises of the Greek pleasures of the table;(47) above all his setting aside the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and substituting for it the Greek hexameter. That the "multiform" poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... feet is called hexameter. This is the form adopted in the Iliad and the Odyssey of the Greeks, and the Aeneid of the Romans; it has been used sometimes by English writers in treating dignified subjects. "The Courtship of Miles Standish" and "Evangeline" are ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... she waved one hand forbiddingly; and Robbie Belle obediently shut her mouth over the few words that were ready to be uttered in greeting. She stood waiting in her tracks, so to speak, until the final hexameter had wailed out its drawling length, and Miss Cutter pushed back the ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... "Agricultural Poems," is a didactic poem in four books, dedicated to Maecenas. In the first book he treats of the cultivation of the soil; in the second, of fruit trees; in the third, of horses and other cattle, and in the fourth, of bees. It gives us the most finished specimen of the Latin hexameter which we have. It is acknowledged by scholars to stand at the head of all Virgil's works, and is certainly the most elaborate and extraordinary instance of power in embellishing a most barren subject which human genius has ever afforded. The commonest precepts of farming are delivered ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Iambic and hexameter, farewell! In that moment the poet died in Thomas; I mean, the poet who had to dig his expressions of life out of ink-pots. Things boil up quickly and unexpectedly in the soul; century-old impulses, undreamed of by the inheritor; and when these bubble ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... it among the host of panegyrical verses prefixed to Master Tom Coryate's Crudities, published in 1611. Even in those days it will be admitted that the English were rather fond of such things, and glorious Will himself bears testimony to the fact. (See Tempest, Act II. Sc. 2.) The hexameter verses are anonymous; perhaps one of your well-read antiquaries may be able to assign to them the author, and be disposed to annotate them. I would particularly ask when was Drake's ship broken up, and is there any ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... ecclesiastical. Of the greatest interest for us are his Riddles. These are short Latin poems somewhat after the model of Symphosius, whose work he describes,[60] and whom he seems ambitious to outstrip. The riddles of Symphosius are uniformly of three hexameter lines, those of Aldhelm vary in length from four lines to sixteen; rarely more. The external structure is that of the Epigram, with the object speaking in the first person. The riddles both of Symphosius and Aldhelm are so closely identified ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... hexameters, no man can tell; but having done so, he thereby constituted for ever the proper metre of Greek—and Latin—Epic poetry. But what a multitude of subjects, how different from one another does that, and every other Epic poem, comprehend! Glory to the hexameter! it suits them all. Now, in every Epic poem, and in few more than in the Iliad, there are many dramatic scenes. But in the Greek tragic drama, the dialogue is mainly in iambics; for this reason, that iambics ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... et ament meminisse periti (Let the unlearned learn, and the learned delight in remembering). This Latin hexameter, which is commonly ascribed to Horace, appeared for the first time as an epigraph to President Henault's "Abrege Chronologique," and in the preface to the third edition of this work Henault acknowledges that he had given it as a translation of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the true method of translation, (especially Homeric translation,) and partly on the particular merits of Mr. Newman's attempt as compared with those of others. Of course, many side-topics are incidentally touched upon, among others, the English hexameter, Mr. Newman's objections to which are particularly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... consulted, a virgin priestess called PYTHIA took her seat upon a tripod which was placed over the chasm. The ascending vapour affected her brain, and the words which she uttered in this excited condition were believed to be the answer of Apollo to his worshippers. They were always in hexameter verse, and were reverently taken down by the attendant priests. Most of the answers were equivocal or obscure; but the credit of the oracle continued unimpaired long after the ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... of verses is used in the epitaphs, but the dactylic hexameter and the elegiac are the favorites. The stately character of the hexameter makes it a suitable medium in which to express a serious sentiment, while the sudden break in the second verse of the elegiac couplet suggests the emotion of the writer. The verses are constructed with ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song at last again, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin |
