Now, so long as men retain the notion that the most perfect English hexameters are those which have spondees in the classical places, they are led to admit such verses as those just quoted; and this being done, the common reader, and indeed every reader, is compelled to do some violence to the language in reading. This, more than any thing else, has made an English hexameter frequently sound forced and unnatural. N.N.T. has a few such in his first Iliad.
"Pressed on the silvery hilt as he spake was the weight of his right hand."
These forms of English hexameter are to be avoided, if you would commend the verse to the common ear. And we may exclude them with a good conscience. Their forced and uneasy movement does not arise from any imperfection in our English spondees; but from the spondee in these cases being so perfect, that it cannot without some violence be made a trochee, which the English verse requires. I do not think you will find this bad trick in Southey. His habitual feeling of English rhythm preserved him from it.
But there is another blemish, which Southey, forgetting his classical rhythm too much, for it ought to have guided his English practice, has often incurred. It is, the writing lines without a cæsura, so that they divide themselves into half lines. Such as these:—
"Washington, said the monarch, | well hast thou spoken and truly."
N.N.T. has a few of these. One is the last line I quoted from him.
The essential point in English hexameters, especially while they are imperfectly naturalized, is, that the rhythm should be unforced. Without this, they will always repel and offend the English reader. And hence, though our rhythm is to be constructed by stress, and not by Latin rules of long and short, still, if it do not destroy it mars the verse, to have, for short syllables, those which have long vowels, clustered consonants, or special emphasis.
Such are the dactyls at the beginning of these lines of Southey:—
"Thōu, tŏo, dĭdst act with upright heart as befitted a sovereign."
Except you prefer to read it thus—