* * * * *
Milton (the carrier) waits impatiently.
S. T. C."
Having once inquired of Mr. Coleridge something respecting a nicety in hexameters, he asked for a sheet of paper, and wrote the following. These hexameters appear in the last edition of Mr. C.'s Poems, though in a less correct form, and without the condensed and well-expressed preliminary remarks. Two new lines are here also added.
"The Hexameter consists of six feet, or twelve times. These feet, in the Latin and Greek languages, were always either dactyls, or spondees; the time of a dactyl, being only that of a spondee. In modern languages, however, metre being regulated by the emphasis, or intonation of the syllables, and not by the position of the letters, spondees can scarcely exist, except in compound words, as dark-red. Our dissyllables are for the most part, either iambics, as desire; or trochees, as languid. These therefore, but chiefly the latter, we must admit, instead of spondees. The four first feet of each line may be dissyllable feet, or dactyls, or both commingled, as best suits the melody, and requisite variety; but the two last feet must, with rare exceptions, be uniformly, the former a dactyl, the latter a dissyllable. The amphimacer may, in English, be substituted for the dactyl, occasionally.
EXAMPLES.
Oh, what a life is the eye! What a fine and inscrutable essence!
He that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him;
He that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother,
He that smiled at the bosom, the babe that smiles in its slumber,
Even to him it exists. It moves, and stirs in its prison;
Lives with a separate life, and "Is it a spirit?" he murmurs,
Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language.
ANOTHER SPECIMEN, DESCRIBING HEXAMETERS IN HEXAMETERS.
Strongly it tilts us along, o'er leaping and limitless billows,
Nothing before, and nothing behind, but the sky and the ocean.