“All right,” said Irv. “Here goes:—
‘Every house was an inn, where all were welcomed and feasted;
For with this simple people, who lived like brothers together,
All things were held in common, and what one had was another’s.
Yet under Benedict’s roof hospitality seemed more abundant.’”
“It really doesn’t sound like poetry,” said Phil. “But then, I’m no judge. All the same, Irv wins the bet, and I’ll exercise my authority as commander of this craft and company to compel you, Will, to buy and deliver that brass button.”
“But how do you know that those four lines are the worst in the poem?” asked Will.
“Because there simply couldn’t be worse ones,” said Phil, “and unless you produce some others equally bad, I shall hold these to be the worst.”
“Now,” said Ed, “you fellows are very free with your criticisms. But perhaps you don’t know as much as you might. Longfellow undertook to write in hexameters. We all know what hexameters are, because we have all read some Latin poetry. But there is this difficulty: a hexameter line must end in a spondee—or a foot of two long or equally accented syllables. Now there is only here and there a word in the whole English language that is a spondee. The only spondees available in English are made up of two long, or two equally accented monosyllables. That is why the metre of Evangeline is so hard to read with ease, or at any rate it is one of the reasons. Longfellow uses trochees—that is to say, feet composed of one long and one short syllable, instead. In one case he uses the word ‘baptism’ as a spondee, but in fact it is a dactyl, consisting of one long and two short syllables. Edgar Allan Poe pointed that out.”
“Why did he write in that metre, then,” asked Will, “if it is impossible in English?”
“Because he was a Greek and Latin scholar, and was so enamored of the hexameter verse that he tried to reproduce it in English. He didn’t accomplish the purpose, but he wrote some mighty good things in trying to do it.”
“But tell us, Ed,” said Constant, “why did Evangeline’s people come all the way down here?”
“They were French, and they naturally sought for a country where the French constituted the greater part of the population. This wasn’t English territory then. By the way, that reminds me of a good Vevay story. When I was a very little boy, I used to go occasionally to pay my respects to the oldest lady in town—‘Grandmother Grisard,’ as we all reverently called her. She was a lovely old lady, and she once told me how she came to Vevay. She set out from Switzerland very early in this century, being then a young girl, to come to this French-settled Red River country, where her people had friends. But there are two Red Rivers in America, this one and the Red River of the North, which runs from Minnesota northward into Manitoba. Europeans were rather weak on American geography in those days, so instead of bringing this young girl to the Red River of Louisiana, the transportation people took her to the Red River of the North. That region was then entirely wild. Indians and Canadian half-breeds were practically its only inhabitants, and so the young Swiss girl was in the greatest peril.