"Hexameter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... for this choice were based upon the legend related by 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 ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... those of Delphi.' This is confusing. Probably the movements of the table, communicated to the thread, caused the bounds of the ring, otherwise there was no use in the table moving. At all events the ring touched THEO (which is not a word that could begin a hexameter) when they asked who was to succeed Valens. Some one called out 'Theodore' and they pursued the experiment no farther. A number of Theodores and Theophiles were put to death, but when Theodosius was joined with Gratian in the Empire, the believers ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... said 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
... 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 examples of ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... prosody. Washington is a stately dactyl; Irving is a sweet and mellow spondee, and thus we have a combination which poets in ancient and modern days have sought with sedulous care, and which should close every line of hexameter verse. Hence a measure such, as that found in 'Washington Irving' terminates every line in Evangeline, or the works of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... also, as they are accustomed to do on such occasions, they sent messengers to inquire of other prophets and also of the Delphic oracle who should be the conqueror. The Pythian priestess, being mindful how she had formerly made a good shot in respect of the Median business, replied in the hexameter rhythm that the issues of victory lay around a wooden wall. Now having this as a proof I will neither refuse to believe in oracles myself nor allow others to disbelieve them. For when the race had begun and the horses had been ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... in his day, and was often called upon to write pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions. He sometimes used Hexameter lines such as: ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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
... 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
... 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 in an equal time with, while containing a greater number of syllables or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... translators of the Iliad, or of parts of it, the metres which have been selected have been almost as various: the ordinary couplet in rhyme, the Spenserian stanza, the Trochaic or Ballad metre, all have had their partisans, even to that "pestilent heresy" of the so-called English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be pressed into the service by a violation of every rule of prosody; and of which, notwithstanding my respect for the eminent men who have attempted to naturalize it, I could never read ten lines ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... 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 der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band iii., Einleitung, p. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... near 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 ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... particolored jackets, with oaths upon their lips and deeds of violence and lust within their hearts, were no associates for him. It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, but Virgil's musical hexameter, sounded through his ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the neighbouring university of Cambridge. It would be out of place here to criticise his poetry. Although it is very unequal and occasionally fantastic, and though in one of his greatest poems the English language appears to dance in chains in the hexameter, many of his shorter pieces well upwards from the heart, in a manner which is likely to ensure durable fame for their author. The truth, energy, and earnestness of his 'Psalm of Life' and 'Goblet of Life,' have urged many forward in ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... professional class of minstrels, when these arose, as in the heroic age of Greece. A minstrel might be attached to a Court, or a noble; or he might go wandering with song and harp among the people. In either case, this class of men developed more regular and ample measures. They evolved the hexameter; the laisse of the Chansons de Geste; the strange technicalities of Scandinavian poetry; the metres of Vedic hymns; the choral odes of Greece. The narrative popular chant became in their hands the Epic, or the ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... 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 was ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... The 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 ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... 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 ancient marbles, the young ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... remorse he must have remembered these strange monsters of his creation! Let us conclude our glance at this sad fall from harmony by quoting the excellent words of one who was a bitter opponent of Harvey in this as in other matters. 'The hexameter verse,' says Nash in his Fowre Letters Confuted, 1592, 'I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of ours hee cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... 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 licensers ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... threat; a menace to those who refuse to follow the better life, a promise of salvation to those who repent. About the year 80 C.E., a book of this kind was composed. It is what is known as the Fourth Book of the Sibylline Oracles. The language is Greek, the form hexameter verse. In this poem, the Sibyl, in the guise of a prophetess, tells of the doom of those who resist the will of the one true God, praises the God of Israel, and holds out a beautiful prospect to ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... action 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 ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... before us spread Where Freedom's full hexameter began— Restore our Epic, which the Nations read ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... gillyflowers, to the bare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-colored,—the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos." But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a yellow ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Yet in the formal history of poetry (and 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 ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts and jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He seems to have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a gleam of mischief in what he writes to Harvey: "I like your late English hexameter so exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometime in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to our ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... 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, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... whole the passage in the translation charms, and its charm is tolerably identical with that of the original. In more martial and stirring passages the failure is more signal, and here especially we feel that if Pope's rhyming couplets are sorry equivalents for the Homeric hexameter, blank verse is superior to them only in a negative way. The real equivalent, if any, is the romance metre of Scott, parts of whose poems, notably the last canto of Marmion and some passages in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... polishing granite as much as you will, The heart keeps its tough old 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
... being here 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.
... Spiritum), lines 1 to 13 of Te Deum are older than the 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 a ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... tells, for instance, of the rebuilding of the great Church of St. Sophia by Justinian, 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
... [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 ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... 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 ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... as a double-edged knife; or say, it faced both ways, like those Hermae which are made 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
... 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 as "the hesitating Dane."...... ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and perversions,—there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the original,—and substituted an interrupted romantic cadence for the stately continuous roll of the hexameter. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... on the whole, a sensible one. Blank verse undoubtedly gives the 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 an unimportant word, is hardly ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Maltravers, if I 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 ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... 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 Pentameter) broken ...
— Faust • Goethe
... 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. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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
... it on the other. What I mean is to recommend an agreeable mediocrity: for we are not treating of verse, but of rhetorical prose, which is confessedly more free and unconfined. A full period, then, is generally composed of four parts, which may be compared to as many hexameter verses, each of which have their proper points, or particles of continuation, by which they are connected so as to form a perfect period. But when we speak by colons, we interupt their union, and, as often as occasion ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... "Dacotah." and last, but not least, to the Rev. E. D. 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 ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... means a national arrangement 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 ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... his eye-sight. I presume that 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, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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
... Greek be ousted from our 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 cheap ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... however, she did not only act in plays written 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 both her weakness and her strength. Until the public had been awakened to an interest in her personality, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... 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 prefer the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... an oracle had been given by the Pythian prophetess to the Spartans, when they consulted about this war at the time when it was being first set on foot, to the effect that either Lacedemon must be destroyed by the Barbarians, or their king must lose his life. This reply the prophetess gave them in hexameter verses, and it ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... 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 this measure, the following ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... The ennobled Deities.—Ver. 172. These were the superior Deities, who formed the privy councillors of Jupiter, and were called 'Di majorum gentium,' or, 'Di consentes.' Reckoning Jupiter as one, they were twelve in number, and are enumerated by Ennius in two limping hexameter lines:— ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 Harold" will serve ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... verse which we call heroic consists of no more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... 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 ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... accused, and for this crime they were severely punished. We have the Arrest des Commissaires du Conseil d'Etat du Roi, from MS. 7170, A. of the Bibliotheque du Roi. {115} We have also allusions in the Franciscanus, a satire in Latin hexameter by George Buchanan. Finally, we have versions in Lavaterus, and in Wierus, De Curat. Laes. Maleficio (Amsterdam, 1660, p. 422). Wierus, born 1515, heard the story when with Sleidan at Orleans, some years after the events. He gives the version of Sleidan, a notably Protestant version. Wierus ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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 almost always musical ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... 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 American letters—when ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... sways to 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 monarchy," ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... 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 are naturally suited for the language ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 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" ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the Phoenix.—"SELEUCUS" (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 ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... six terms in it. The true name 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 has ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Indian economics; the half-pay officer is too fluent on his worn-out recollections of 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... own it, was claimed by a certain versifier 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
... 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 treatise on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... 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 date on the chair[1] made ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... 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
... the humility of the elegiack stile and subjects, compared with epick or lyrick sublimity. Monsieur Dacier rather thinks that Horace refers here, as in the words Versibus impariter junctis, "Couplets unequal," to the use of pentameter, or short verse, consisting of five feet, and joined to the hexameter, or long verse, of six. This inequality of the couplet Monsieur Dacier justly prefers to the two long Alexandrines of his own country, which sets almost all the French poetry, Epick, Dramatick, Elegiack, or Satyrick, to the tune of Derry Down. In our language, the ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... which has been utilized by Shakespeare. Moreover, it is in Greek that the first complete treatise on fishing which has come down to us is written, the Halieutica of Oppian (c. A.D. 169). It is a hexameter poem in five books with perhaps more technical than sporting interest, and not so much even of that as the length of the work would suggest. Still it contains some information about tackle and methods, and some passages describing battles with big fish, in the right spirit ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... 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
... partly on the 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 are particularly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 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 misplaced ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... were 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 him ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Silence that of Romans;—nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison! The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one. Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad; not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and forms merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic Deeds,—a mighty Conquest over ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of Orphic song, of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic, the other ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 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
... 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 ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... 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 ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... (Vol. 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 both an alcaic ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... of the English hexameter. Gabriel Harvey's Four Letters (Third Letter). See Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... say, "Either your 'living intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact." Many—very many—similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... verse^, leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... numbers, as of the eras, or dates of history. This was done by substituting one consonant and one vowel for each figure of the ten cyphers used in arithmetic, and by composing words of these letters; which words Mr. Grey makes into hexameter verses, and produces an audible jargon, which is to be committed to memory, and occasionally analysed into numbers when required. An ingenious French botanist, Monsieur Bergeret, has proposed to ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... or Praecepta, 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 which are ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... Fraunce, a Versifier, 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 was he altogether ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... 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
... 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
... des Landes, 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 ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One does want to see the peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel, Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Chios), 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
... the 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 us, as merely chaotic labyrinths of sound, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... checking each of 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 ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... Sane istud: Halm istuc from G. Inquit: for the late position of this word, which is often caused by its affinity for quoniam, quidem, etc., cf. M.D.F. III. 20 Quae cum essent dicta, in conspectu consedimus (omnes): most edd. since Gulielmus print this without essent as a hexameter, and suppose it a quotation. But firstly, a verse so commonplace, if familiar, would occur elsewhere in Cic. as others do, if not familiar, would not be given without the name of its author. Secondly, most MSS. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... heredo. Hermit ermito. Hernia hernio. Hero heroo. Heroic heroa. Heroine heroino. Heroism heroeco. Heron ardeo. Herring haringo. Hesitate sxanceligxi. Hesitation sxanceligxo. Hew dehaki. Hexagon sesangulo. Hexameter heksametro. Hiatus manko. Hiccough singulto. Hidden kasxita. Hide kasxi. Hide (skin) hauxto. Hideous malbelega. Hiding-place kasxejo. Hierarchy hierarhxio. Hieroglyphic hieroglifo. High alta. Highlander montano. Highness (title) mosxto. High-tide alfluo. Highway ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... yourself, John?" I asked, thanklessly quoting from the familiar hexameter, and lighting my pipe as ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... 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 ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... sending swift arrows from an 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 ribbands and crescent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man never 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 ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... 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 ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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, and generally had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... 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 same forward as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... almost succeeds in that impossible feat—the revival of the hexameter in English. It may be a hard saying to the countrymen of Longfellow, but the truth is that the hexameter is a metrical monster in our English speech. The paucity of easy dactyls and the absence of all true spondees in English words, the preponderance of consonants over ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Johannis Burnby et animae omnium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei in pace requiescant. Vestris nostra damus, pro nostris vestra rogamus. The other houses employ identical terms, with the exception of the monastery of St. Paul, Newenham, Lincolnshire, which substitutes for the concluding verse a hexameter of similar import. It is of some interest to remark that, apart from armorial or fanciful initials, the standing of a house may be gauged by the handwriting, the titles of the larger monasteries being given in bold letters, while those of the smaller form an almost illegible scrawl. The greater ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... 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 greatness might have ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... will 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 curtly melodious ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Scott's style, and his circumstantial descriptions, bore much 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 to attempt the ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker |
