When English hexameters were revived at the end of the eighteenth century, it was in good part under German influence. Bodmer, Klopstock, and Voss, followed later by Goethe, made the German hexameter popular; and William Taylor of Norwich, who in many ways helped to familiarize his countrymen with German literature, became interested in the form. In 1796, the year of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, he contributed to the Monthly Magazine an article called "English Hexameters Exemplified," in which occurred the paraphrase from Ossian here quoted. Taylor pointed out that the hexameter of the Germans was purely accentual. They were "obliged, by the scarceness of long vowels and the rifeness of short syllables in their language, to tolerate the frequent substitution of trochees for spondees in their hexameter verse; and they scan, like other modern nations, by emphasis, not by position." (Quoted in J. W. Robberds's Memoir of William Taylor of Norwich, vol. i. pp. 157 ff.) Most later writers of English hexameters have followed the line here indicated, and have frankly abandoned the effort to represent the quantities of classical prosody.
Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother,
Sister thou of the stars, and beloved by the Sun, the rejoicer!
Guardian and friend of the moon, O Earth, whom the comets forget not,
Yea, in the measureless distance wheel round and again they behold thee!
Fadeless and young (and what if the latest birth of creation?)
Bride and consort of Heaven, that looks down upon thee enamoured!
(Coleridge: Hymn to the Earth. 1799.)
Coleridge made several experiments in hexameters at this time, and planned, together with Southey, a long hexameter poem on Mohammed. To Wordsworth he sent an experiment of the same kind in a lighter vein:
"Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table;
Place it on table or desk; and your right hands loosely half-closing,
Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,
Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forked left hand,
Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of each finger,
Read with a nod of the head in a humoring recitativo;
And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before you.
This is a galloping measure, a hop, and a trot, and a gallop!"
(Wordsworth's Memoirs, quoted in Coleridge's Poems, Aldine edition, vol. ii. p. 307.)
Coleridge also translated from Schiller the well-known distich describing and exemplifying the elegiac verse of Ovid:
"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."
This distich, it is interesting to find, was revised by Tennyson so as to represent the measure quantitatively rather than accentually: