Arnold, however, wisely declined to be led into a discussion of the relations of accent and quantity in English. "All we are here concerned with," he said, "is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter in its effect upon us moderns.... The received English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter.... I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed." (See the whole passage, On Translating Homer, pp. 275-284.)
The hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, quoted by Arnold, are these:
Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders,
Kastor fleet in the car,—Polydeukes brave with the cestus,—
Own dear brethren of mine,—one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved Lakedaimon,
Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?
—So said she. They long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lakedaimon.
(From English Hexameter Translations, p. 242.)
Arnold also illustrated his doctrine in some hexameters of his own, which have not usually been regarded as a happy experiment. They run in part as follows:
"Truly, yet this time will we save thee, mighty Achilles!
But thy day of death is at hand; nor shall we be the reason—
No, but the will of heaven, and Fate's invincible power.
For by no slow pace nor want of swiftness of ours
Did the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Patroclus;
But that prince among gods, the son of the lovely-haired Leto,
Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector.
But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind,
Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds; 'tis thou who art fated
To lie low in death, by the hand of a god and a mortal."
(Ib., p. 234.)
Tennyson evidently viewed with small respect these various efforts to render Homer in English hexameters. See his lines beginning:
"These lame hexameters the strong-wing'd music of Homer!
No—but a most burlesque barbarous experiment."