God, on verdurous Helicon
Dweller, child of Urania,
Thou that draw'st to the man the fair
Maiden, O Hymenæus, O
Hymen, O Hymenæus!
(Robinson Ellis: Poems of Catullus, LXI. 1871.)
Mr. Ellis's translations from Catullus are all "in the metres of the original," and are among the most interesting specimens of modern classical versifying. "Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllabics," he said in his Preface, "suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was reproduced also." Of special interest is the imitation of the "almost unapproachable" galliambic verse of the Attis (pp. 49-53):
"When awoke the sun, the golden, that his eyes heaven-orient
Scann'd lustrous air, the rude seas, earth's massy solidity,
When he smote the shadowy twilight with his healthy team sublime,
Then arous'd was Attis; o'er him sleep hastily fled away
To Pasithea's arms immortal with a tremulous hovering."
As Mr. Ellis observes, the metre of Tennyson's Boadicea was modelled on this of Catullus. Compare also Mr. George Meredith's Phaëthon, "attempted in the galliambic measure":
"At the coming up of Phœbus, the all-luminous charioteer,
Double-visaged stand the mountains in imperial multitudes,
And with shadows dappled, men sing to him, Hail, O Beneficent;
For they shudder chill, the earth-vales, at his clouding, shudder to black."
—Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant
Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene.
(Swinburne: Sapphics, in Poems and Ballads.)