"Hexameter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 first—and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... him, I 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 Meadow, and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... obliged to any of your readers who will refer me to an hexameter line in the authorised English ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... Semi-sentimental theories as to the relations of the sexes, the dangers of indiscriminate education, the corruptions of wretchedness and poverty in large towns, the neglect of literature and classical learning, and the grievances of scholarly refinement in a world in which Greek iambic and Latin hexameter count for nothing,—such form the staple of his theses and tirades! His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... Bathyllus, whom Caesar duly rewarded, A few days later, however, Virgil again set in the same place a quatrain each line of which commenced 'sic vos non vobis...' but was unfinished, and preceeded these by the one hexameter ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... how little Milton really has in common with Virgil. "Paradise Lost" seems to us far more akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter. Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... 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 an unimportant ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... to the Spenserian stanza which is composed of nine lines, eight of which are iambic pentameters, and the ninth a hexameter or Alexandrine. The name Alexandrine is said to have been derived from an old French poem on Alexander the Great, written about the twelfth or thirteenth century, and composed entirely of hexameter verses. See note on the versification of the ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... more strange, it has long been the object of a religious cult. The right foot, so mangled by poor Pietro, wears a fine brass shoe, in order to prevent its being kissed away. This almost makes one think of Goethe's hexameter: "Wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde." Still it must be remembered that excellent critics have found the whole work admirable. Gsell-Fels says: "It is his second Moses; in movement ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... resemblance to those of Homer and that the rapid flow of Scott's verse was happily accommodated to the swift succession of events, and fiery impetuosity of the Iliad; corresponding with the dactylic hexameter of the old poet. These hints induced the author ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... soul, on the existence of God or future rewards and punishments. Although it was purely Grecian in its origin and development, it became one of the grand ornaments of the Roman schools. The Romans did not originate medicine, but Galen was one of its greatest lights; they did not invent the hexameter verse, but Virgil sang to its measure; they did not create Ionic capitals, but their cities were ornamented with marble temples on the same principles as those which called out the admiration of Pericles. So, if they did not originate philosophy, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Anapaestic verses are further designated as dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, according to the number of dipodies (pairs of feet) which they contain. Dactylic verses are measured by single feet, and are designated as tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, accordingly. ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... "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 you ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... the Peninsular War, and becomes savage if you broach a new theme, or move to adjourn the debate; the university pedant distracts you with his theories on philology and scansion—with his amended translation of a hexameter in Persius, and his new reading of a line in Theocritus; the bagman is all for 'the shop;' the policeman is redolent of the 'lock-up house 'and 'your wertchup;' the tailor is profoundly knowing on the 'sweating system; 'the son of Crispin vows and protests ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... been characterised as "simple, musical, sincere, sympathetic, clear as crystal, and pure as snow." He has written in a great variety of measures— in more, perhaps, than have been employed by Tennyson himself. His "Evangeline" is written in a kind of dactylic hexameter, which does not always scan, but which is ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Sibylline books, supposed to have been sold to Tarquinius Superbus by the Sibyl of Cumae: they were written in Greek hexameter verses. In times of emergency and distress they were consulted and interpreted by special priests (the ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... 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 of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... (No. 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 ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... of a "miscellaneous education," we will put on the Vicar's simplicity, and cheerful familiarity with his own flesh and blood—and thus we address our Moses, "Come, my boy, you are no hand at singing, so turn the Elegy another way: let us have a little Latin, for your music is Hexameter and Pentameter." Our Moses, "That's a hard task, sir, for one that cannot mount to Parnass Hill without his 'Gradus ad Parnassum.'" "Well, then get your Gradus, and put your foot in that first step of the ladder." Our Moses, waggishly—"I must mind my feet, sir, or they will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... of a love "that hopes and endures and is patient." The metrical form, dactylic hexameter, is one that few of our poets have successfully used, and many have thought it wholly unfitted to English verse. Longfellow has certainly disproved their theory, for his success with this meter is pronounced. The long, flowing lines seem to be exactly adapted to give the scenes ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... 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 soil ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... reprints of which are in the British Museum; also "The Encomium of Lady Pecunia, or the Praise of Money," a curious manuscript in the Ashmolean Museum, and likewise printed in the author's life-time. It should be mentioned that in the original copies of the following tract are a few hexameter verses on the Rape of Helen, which have been omitted as of an inferior kind to the other part of the work, and for still more obvious reasons. The "Affectionate Shepherd" itself will be found remarkably free from the coarseness which disfigures so much of the Elizabethan literature,—an ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... objected Gringoire; "I shall break my neck. Your stool limps like one of Martial's distiches; it has one hexameter ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... against this blank Bolshevism, and furthermore that this new Legion was going to be the most tremendous organization that the U.S.A. had ever seen." If he had told me that Swinburne's Faustine was written in iambic hexameter it would have sounded more like old times. But here was a new man, strong and virile, intensely interested in ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... 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.
... Italian paintings of saints, a want of the like attention. Father Papebroke, when he cites this passage, adopts the remark, and loudly calls on Innocent XII. to attend to the general decency of all public paintings and statues. A Greek Calendar of the Saints in hexameter verse accompanies the Russian Calendar, in the Acta Sanctorum; both are illustrated with notes by father ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... would be a tendency to say h['o]nor['i]ficabilit['u]dinit['a]tibus. Thus there ought not to be much difficulty in saying C['o]nstant['i]nop['o]lit['a]ni, whether you keep the long antepenultima or shorten it after the English way; but he who forced the reluctant word to end an hexameter must have had 'Constantin['o]ple' in his mind, and therefore said Const['a]ntin['o]polit['a]ni with two false stresses. The result was an illicit lengthening of the second o. His other false quantity, the shortening of the second i, was due to the English pronunciation, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... you must sing it with long-drawn emphasis on each word, lengthening it into at least two syllables; the first a sort of hexameter, the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... stanza. The 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 ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... though this is not yet fixed definitely. In his account of the three ancient tripods dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Thebes,[1] he says of one of them, {o men de eis ton tripodon epigramma ekhei}, and then quotes the single hexameter line engraved upon it. Of the other two he says simply, "they say in hexameter," {legei en exametro tono}. Again, where he describes the funeral monuments at Thermopylae,[2] he uses the words {gramma} and {epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... recorded of any other men whomsoever, were all the night employed in singing of hymns, and in mirth. [31] Moses also composed a song unto God, containing his praises, and a thanksgiving for his kindness, in hexameter ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... double, alike whether you look at front or back. Consider; will Croesus's passage of the Halys destroy his own realm, or Cyrus's? Tet the wretched Sardian paid a long price for his ambidextrous hexameter. ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... Cirencester proves that place to have been in Britannia Prima. It is figured by Haverfield ('Eng. Hist. Rev.' July 1896), and runs as follows: Septimius renovat Primae Provinciae Rector Signum et erectam prisca religione columnam. This is meant for two hexameter lines, and refers to Julian's revival of Paganism ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... 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 dashes of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:[229] and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Neill, whose admirable "History of Minnesota" so fully and faithfully presents almost all that is known of the history, traditions, customs, manners and superstitions of the Dakotas. In Winona I have "tried my hand" on Hexameter verse. With what success, I leave to those who are better able to judge than I. If I have failed, I have but added another failure to the numerous vain attempts to naturalize Hexameter verse in ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... more or less caustic epigrams amused them. Sometimes one would suggest the topic and the other write the distich; again, one would do the hexameter, the other the pentameter. They agreed that neither should ever claim separate property in the Xenia, as they were called. The number grew apace, until it reached nearly a thousand. About half the number on hand were published in 1797 in Schiller's Musenalmanach and had the effect of setting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... sepulta" (Vol. ii., p.133.).—In the course of my reading, some time back, I met with a passage which was given as quotation from Bishop Hall. I transcribe it, as it appears to me to approach nearer to the above hexameter than even ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... in his day, and was often called upon to write pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions. He sometimes used Hexameter lines ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... fine picture into blank verse so well, as to convince the public, that the beauties of Klopstock can be naturalized without strangeness, and his peculiarities retained without affectation; that quaintness, the unavoidable companion of neologism, is as needless to genius, as hostile to grace; the hexameter, until it is familiar, must repel, and, when it is familiar, may annoy; that it wants a musical orderliness of sound; and that its cantering capricious movement opposes the grave march of solemn majesty, and better suits the ordinary scenery of Theocritus than the empyreal visions ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... 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 was to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... love, and in order to gain the 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
... first published in The Liberal, No. III., April 26, 1823, When Cain was finished Byron turned from grave to gay, from serious to humorous theology. Southey had thought fit to eulogize George III. in hexameter verse. He called his funeral ode a "Vision of Judgment." In the preface there was an obvious reference to Byron. The "Satanic School" of poetry was attributed to "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations." Byron's revenge was complete. In his "Vision of Judgment" (published ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... (772-795). 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 II. is ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... old literary monuments in Rome," says a modern writer, "were written in Saturnian verse, the oldest measure used by the Latin poets. It was probably derived from the Etruscans, and until Ennius introduced the heroic hexameter the strains of the Italian bards flowed in this metre. The structure of the Saturnian is very simple, and its rhythmical arrangement is found in the poetry of every age and country. Macaulay adduces as an example of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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 the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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 of the ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... language, draws up canons of criticism from his writings, and is intolerant of innovation. Those who come under its influence are dissuaded or deterred from striking out a path of their own. Thus Virgil's transcendent excellence fixed the character of the hexameter in subsequent poetry, and took away the chances, if not of improvement, at least of variety. Even Juvenal has much of Virgil in the structure of his verse. I have known those who ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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 Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... containing moral maxims. (e) Hedyphagetica, 'On Gastronomy,' modelled on a hexameter poem by Archestratus (about B.C. 310). (f) Sota, so called from Sotades, after whom the Sotadean metre has been named. The book was probably of a lascivious nature. (g) Epigrams; the chief of ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... 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 stile ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... character of Homer's poetry, partly on 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... his library for literary impulse and material. Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an artist is manifested by his successful domestication in Evangeline of the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect. The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, so that we have now arrived at the time—a proud moment for ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... little 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 force shall ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 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 Pentameter) ...
— Faust • Goethe
... 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
... become one and has found its true high priest. In poetry his more ambitious efforts were The Saint's Tragedy, a drama in blank verse on the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Andromeda, a revival of the old Greek legend in the old hexameter measure. But what are most sure to live are his lyrics, 'Airlie Beacon', 'The Three Fishers', 'The Sands of Dee', with their simplicity and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... as well as the two lovers, are recreated, and this so skillfully that while they are made notably familiar to us as individuals, they are no less significant as permanent types of human nature. The hexameter measure which he employed, and which is retained in the present translation, he handled with such charm that it has since seemed the natural verse for the domestic idyl—witness the obvious imitation of this, as of other features of the ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... perfect hexameter.* I feel not in me those sordid and unchristian desires of my profession; I do not secretly implore and wish for plagues, rejoice at famines, revolve ephemerides and almanacks in expectation of malignant aspects, fatal conjunctions, and eclipses. I rejoice not at unwholesome ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... 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
... an unfortunate hiatus in his education, did not know what a hexameter might be, he was artist enough to comprehend the effect of attire on creative work, for he had noticed that he himself could make more money in one necktie than in another, and he would instinctively take particular care in the morning ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... learn that "there is no Hexameter, Elegiack, Saphick, Asclepiad, lambick, or any other kind of Latin or Greek verse, but I will afford you another in this language of the same ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... second part, which was written probably as a sequel to the early hymn. The rhythm of the hymn is very beautiful, being free from abruptness and monotony. Students of poetry may note that seven lines have the exact hexameter ending, if scanned accentually, as voce proclamant; Deus sabbaoth, etc. Seven have two dactyls, as laudabilis numerus, laudat exercitus; one ends with spondees, apostolorum chorus. The other six lines have ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... remarked that the Hazaj is not in use as a hexameter, but only with an 'Aruz majzuah or shortened by one foot. Hence it is only in the second 'Aruz of the Wafir, which is likewise majzuah, that the ambiguity as to the real nature of the metre can arise;[FN457] and the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 also called an ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... 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, her grey hair had come loose from the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... put the moon into my verses, in all probability it was to rhyme to noon. 'The night was at her noon'—is a capital ending for the first hexameter—and the moon is booked for the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one of 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 grim ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as much out of keeping (if they could be kept at 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.
... charge Rueckert 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... on the other hand, he was a perfect ass. You know, some people seem to have that part of their brains wanting that deals with figures, and Alec couldn't add two and two together without making a hexameter out of it. One day his tutor got in a passion with him and said he'd rather teach arithmetic to a brick wall. I happened to be present, and he was certainly very rude. He was a man who had a precious gift for making people feel thoroughly uncomfortable. ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... there was an attempt to justify the inclusion of translations of the Psalms among other metrical experiments. Googe, defending the having of the Psalms in metre, declares that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other parts of the Bible "were written by the first authors in perfect and pleasant hexameter verses."[246] Stanyhurst[247] and Fraunce[248] both tried putting the Psalms into English hexameters. There was, however, no accurate knowledge of the Hebrew verse system. The preface to the American Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640,[249] explains that "The ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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
... 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
... the first to discover that the hexameter could never take its place in English verse, and they had to endure some opposition and even raillery from Gabriel Harvey, who was especially annoyed at Edmund Spenser's desertion; and had bid him farewell till God or some good angel put ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... that I never understood prosody, much less the rules of versification; yet, anxious to understand the harmony of the language, both in prose and verse, I have made many efforts to obtain it, but am convinced, that without a master it is almost impossible. Having learned the composition of the hexameter, which is the easiest of all verses, I had the patience to measure out the greater part of Virgil into feet and quantity, and whenever I was dubious whether a syllable was long or short, immediately consulted my Virgil. It may easily be conceived that I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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," ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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 ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... son of Philip himself, though he bade 'spare the house of Pindarus,' we vehemently suspect, never read the works of Pindarus; that labour he left to some future Hercules. So much for his subjects: but a second objection is—his metre: The hexameter, or heroic metre of the ancient Greeks, is delightful to our modern ears; so is the Iambic metre fortunately of the stage: but the Lyric metres generally, and those of Pindar without one exception, are as utterly without meaning to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... and he adds:—"If any one who happens to live in some place remote from the city wishes to get a clear notion of every part, as though he were there, let him read what Paulus [Silentiarius] has composed in hexameter verse." ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... looks still justified. In religious ceremonies or in formal intercourse 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 ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 are ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... academies or clubs of men of letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin hexameter poem showing great learning. There also he paid his famous visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the Areopagitica, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... 6th century B.C. Suidas mentions three: a Boeotian, an Arcadian and an Athenian. The first, who was the most famous, was said to have been inspired by the nymphs of the Corycian cave. His oracles, of which specimens are extant in Herodotus and Pausanias, were written in hexameter verse, and were considered to have been strikingly fulfilled. The Arcadian was said to have cured the women of Sparta of a fit of madness. Many of the oracles which were current under his name have been attributed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the same with me. Here on my table, for instance, lies Tacitus. I found it mentioned not long ago that the first sentence of the Annals is a hexameter—did you know it?—and when I had once got hold of the book I thought it a shabby thing to return it to the dust of its shelf without reading at least a few pages. So I have gone on from day to day, with no little enjoyment. Buckland, as you ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the Eye somewhat like a Fortune-telling Screen. What a Joy must it be to the unlearned Operator to find that these Words, being carefully collected and writ down in Order according to the Problem, start of themselves into Hexameter and Pentameter Verses? A Friend of mine, who is a Student in Astrology, meeting with this Book, performed the Operation, by the Rules there set down; he shewed his Verses to the next of his Acquaintance, who happened to understand Latin; and being informed they described a Tempest of Wind, very ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sight; but to be suspected of pocketing a silver spoon, which, 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
... moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about their accents and their recessions. Moreover, there was a rival school at Pergamus where the fame of Crates all but equalled ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... 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, and imitates him in what is probably ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... 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
... and over again we have anax andron Agamemnon; or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and over again is the sea poluphloisbois-terous, as if he could say nothing new about it. Having discovered one resounding phrase that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his imagination as to flash some new revelation on it. As if Hamlet should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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
... for the fallacy therefore is the Fallacy of More than Three Terms. But it is rare to find an attempted syllogism which has more than four terms in it, just as we are seldom tendered a line as an hexameter, which ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... lines stretch all across the page and cannot be measured by so many iambics or anapaests, yet, if it be real poetry, heart-felt and heart-moving, it will be but a delusive prose, a prose of infinitely subtle rhythms and harmonies. It will be as far removed as the Homeric hexameter from the pedestrian motion of ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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
... meant to say that it was natural for a gentleman in a passion to talk threescore and ten iambics consecutively: a chance line might escape him once and away; as we know that Tacitus opened one of his works by a regular dactylic hexameter in full curl, without ever discovering it to his dying day (a fact which is clear from his never having corrected it); and this being a very artificial metre, a fortiori Tacitus might have slipped into a simple iambic. But that was an accident, whilst Addison had deliberately and uniformly ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... but also of its consequences—this rise of man's spiritual hierarchy as here unfolded, from Nature, into Institutions, and thence into Art. After hearing Demodocus, Ulysses picks up the thread and becomes his own poet, narrating his adventures in Fairyland with the free full swing of the Homeric hexameter. Thus he acquires and applies in his own way the art of Phaeacia; the arch of his life spans over from the heroic fighter before Troy to the romantic singer ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... versatile 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.
... cause to be written down 39 and bear it back to him. Now what the other Oracles prophesied is not by any reported, but at Delphi, so soon as the Lydians entered the sanctuary of the temple 40 to consult the god and asked that which they were commanded to ask, the Pythian prophetess spoke thus in hexameter measure: ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... before us spread Where Freedom's full hexameter began— Restore our Epic, which the Nations read As far its ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... the average six to seven words contained in the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent as often ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... woher der Mnner?} The German translation of the first half of the Greek hexameter: [Greek: tis pothen eis andrn? pothi toi polis de tokes?] so frequently occurring in Homer: Who art thou? And of what race of men? And where ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... 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 ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement and a pathos, which have charmed all subsequent ages. Homer, far more than any other author, was the educator of the Greeks. There was a class called Homeridae, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... have Latin hexameter verses inscribed on them, composed by monks, which are called Leonine verses, from one Leoninus, a monk of Marseilles, who lived in the early part of the twelfth century. A few ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... 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
... 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 ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... about the same time with John Higgins, was one who imitated Latine measure in English Verse, writing a Pastoral, called the Countess of Pembroke's Ivy-church, and some other things in Hexameter, some also in Hexameter and Pentameter; He also wrote the Countess of Pembroke's Emanuel, containing the Nativity, Passion, Burial, and Resurrection of Christ, together with certain Psalms of David, all in English Hexameters. Nor ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... call heroic consists of no more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for example, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... schools, or are to know only in the distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests the various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse give us a feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded to their own style. Translators who employ prose "tell the story without the song," but, at least, they add no twopenny "beauties" and ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... BRIDGES (the Poet-Laureate) writes to say that, having given special study to the hexameter, he was much interested to find that the measure now in vogue amongst bishops was that of six feet and over. He hoped to treat the subject exhaustively in his forthcoming ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... viii., pp. 292. 375.).—In answer to these inquiries, the copyright of this united hexameter and pentameter belongs to Mr. De la Pryme, of Trin. Coll., Cambridge, who is also the author of another line which is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... religious and 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 ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright cheers, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... not have 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, a most ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... would seem to have been his own invention; [Footnote: At least I can remember no other long poem composed in it.] and is a very agreeable change from the perpetual iambics of Byron and Wordsworth. "Evangeline" is perhaps the most successful instance of Greek and Latin hexameter being grafted on to an English stem. Matthew Arnold considered it too dactylic, but the lightness of its movement personifies the grace of the heroine ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... and fro in an ecstasy, and now, duly "inspired," answers in a somewhat 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 destroy a mighty ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... perhaps not without interest to call the reader's attention to the fact that "Fulget hon|orifi |cabili|tudini|tatibus|iste" forms a neat Latin hexameter. It will be found that the revelation derived from the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus is itself also in the form of a ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... Tacitus, who begins his history of Rome by these words: 'Urbem Roman a principio reges habuere'. They form a very poor Latin hexameter, which the great historian certainly never made on purpose, and which he never remarked when he revised his work, for there is no doubt that, if he had observed it, he would have altered that sentence. Are not such verses considered a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the charitable Icarus. A very good simile, my dear Dunsford, but rather of the Latin-verse order. I almost see it worked into an hexameter and pentameter, and delighting the heart ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... word (commonly spelt Bothie), your correspondent 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
... 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
... some or all of the preceding, as the case may be, being trochees. (Rengifo, Arte Poetica Espanola, (Barcelona, 1727,) cap. 9, 44.) Critics have derived this delightful measure from various sources. Sarmiento traces it to the hexameter of the ancient Romans, which may be bisected into something analogous to the redondillas. (Memorias, pp. 168-171.) Bouterwek thinks it may have been suggested by the songs of the Roman soldiery. (Geschichte ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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
... thought idle or presumptuous to make a new attempt towards the naturalization among us of any measure based on the ancient hexameter. Even Mr Southey has not been in general successful in such efforts; yet no one can deny that here and there—as, for instance, at the opening of his Vision of Judgment, and in his Fragment on Mahomet—he has produced English hexameters of very happy construction, uniting vigour ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... as it was called in contradistinction to rhyming, was becoming fast the fashion among the more learned. Stonyhurst and others had tried their hands at hexameter translations from the Latin and Greek epics, which seem to have been doggerel enough; and ever and anon some youthful wit broke out in iambics, sapphics, elegiacs, and what not, to the great detriment of the queen's English and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... complete; but is there not a 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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... form, remained foreign to the people, like the experiments of Leconte de Lisle in France; in Italy it fared otherwise with Carducci's Odi barbare. Only one antique metre became German, in the same sense that Shakespeare had become a German poet; this was the hexameter, alone or in connection with the pentameter; for the ratio of its parts to one another, on which everything depends in higher metrics, corresponded, to some extent, to that of the German couplets. For the same reason the sonnet—not, however, without a long and really bitter ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... oritur.' Here, in truth, is a reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the 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 and other works of Guglielmus Apuliensis and his successors (from about ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... (B.C. 660 to B.C. 630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music—the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... most naturally in a well-arranged oration. For some people think that it is the iambic rhythm, because that is the most like a speech, on which account it happens that it is most frequently employed in fables, because of its resemblance to reality—because the dactylic hexameter rhythm is better suited to a lofty and magniloquent subject But Ephorus himself, an inconsiderable orator, though coming from an excellent school, inclines to the paeon, or dactyl, but avoids the spondee and trochee. For because ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... celerity (this being the principle of the Alexandrine:)—inconsistency, in that Pope himself uses the same contrivance to convey the contrary idea of slowness. But why in English? It is not and cannot be disputed that, in the Hexameter verse of the Greeks and Latins—which is the model in this matter—what is distinguished as the 'dactylic line' was uniformly applied to express velocity. How was it to do so? Simply from the fact of being pronounced ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... that he did much, but there was a 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 prize in his own college, and brought home to his mother ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enrich the library of his archiepiscopal patron with good books and industrious students.[233] Well might Egbert be proud of his librarian: the first, I believe upon record, who has composed a catalogue[234] of books in Latin hexameter verse: and full reluctantly, I ween, did this librarian take leave of his Cell stored with the choicest volumes—as we may judge from his pathetic address to it, on quitting England for France! If I recollect rightly, Mr. Turner's elegant ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin |
