Tydides also fled with me, his company calling;
Later, upon our track followed the yellow Meneläus;
In Lesbos found us, debating there of the long voyage,
Were we to sail, to wit, by this side of rocky Chios,
Making for Psyrie-isle, Chios being kept to the larboard,
Or to the far side Chios along by the windy Mimante.
Will this sort of thing please the modern ear? It is to be feared not. It is too late a day in this nineteenth century to introduce a new principle, however good, into modern European verse. We must be content, perhaps, in this, as in other and higher matters, to take things as we find them, and make the best we can of them. You, I dare say, my dear sir, though perhaps no great lover of hexameters at all, will prefer to my laboured Homerics the rough-and-ready Anglo-savage lines that follow. They render the prayer of Achilles when he is sending out Patroclus with the Myrmidons to check the victory of the Trojans.
Dodonëan, Pelasgican Zeus, up in heaven above us,
King of Dodona, the stormy and cold, where thy Selli attend thee,
Barefoot, that wash not their feet, whose bed is the earth, thy expounders—