(In Quantity: Hexameters and Pentameters.)
Compare the amusing lines of Walter Savage Landor:
"Askest thou if in my youth I have mounted, as others have mounted,
Galloping Hexameter, Pentameter cantering after,
English by dam and by sire; bit, bridle, and saddlery, English;
English the girths and the shoes; all English from snaffle to crupper;
Everything English about, excepting the tune of the jockey?....
Seldom my goosequill, of goose from Germany, fatted in England,
(Frolicsome though I have been) have I tried on Hexameter, knowing
Latin and Greek are alone its languages. We have a measure
Fashioned by Milton's own hand, a fuller, a deeper, a louder.
.... Peace be with all! but afar be ambition to follow the Roman,
Led by the German uncombed and jigging in dactyl and spondee,
Lumbering shapeless jackboots which nothing can polish or supple.
Much as old metres delight me, 'tis only where first they were nurtured,
In their own clime, their own speech: than pamper them here, I would rather
Tie up my Pegasus tight to the scanty-fed rack of a sonnet."
(English Hexameters, in The Last Fruit off an Old Tree.)
In like manner Mr. Swinburne says: "I must say how inexplicable it seems to me that Mr. Arnold, of all men, should be a patron of English hexameters. His own I have tried in vain to reduce by scansion into any metrical feet at all; they look like nothing on earth, and sound like anapests broken up and driven wrong.... And at best what ugly bastards of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands could utter or could write them except by way of burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never shall." (Essays and Studies, p. 163.) From this condemnation Mr. Swinburne excepts only the hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, "but that is simply a graceful interlude of pastime."
See also the essay called "Remarks on English Hexameters," in the Horæ Hellenicæ of Professor John Stuart Blackie.
Hovering over the water he came, upon glittering pinions,
Living, a wonder, outgrown from the tight-laced fold of his sandals;
Bounding from billow to billow, and sweeping the crests like a sea-gull;
Leaping the gulfs of the surge, as he laughed in the joy of his leaping.
Fair and majestic he sprang to the rock; and the maiden in wonder
Gazed for a while, and then hid in the dark-rolling wave of her tresses,
Fearful, the light of her eyes; while the boy (for her sorrow had awed him)
Blushed at her blushes, and vanished, like mist on the cliffs at the sunrise.
Fearful at length she looked forth: he was gone: she, wild with amazement,
Wailed for her mother aloud: but the wail of the wind only answered.
(Charles Kingsley: Andromeda. 1858.)
Kingsley believed in the possibility of representing the quantitative verse of classical poetry in English, and at the same time holding to genuinely English rhythm.[46] Thus he tried to introduce more real spondees into his hexameters than Longfellow and others had done. Compare such a line as Longfellow's—
"Man is unjust, but God is just; and finally justice"—