Tityrus, you in the shadow Of chestnuts stretcht in the meadow,
Practise your pastoral verses In strains which your oat-pipe rehearses.
We, poor exiles, are leaving All our saving and having;
Leaving the land that we treasure: You in the woods at your pleasure
Make them resound, when your will is, The name of the fair Amaryllis.
But these rhymes, even if written in one long line, are really two short lines with a double rhyme; and this measure, besides its difficulty, is destitute of dignity and grace.
If we take the same measure, rejecting rhyme, and keep the dactylics pure, we have such distichs as these:—
Tityrus, you in the shade
Of a mulberry idly reclining,
Practise your pastoral muse
In the strains that your flageolet utters.
But these may be written in long lines, thus:—
Tityrus, you in the shade of a mulberry idly reclining,
Practise your pastoral muse, in the strains that your flageolet utters;
We from the land that we love, from our property sever’d and banish’d,
We go as exiles away; and yet, Tityrus, you at your leisure
Tutor the forests to ring with the name of the fair Amaryllis.
These verses are of a rhythm as familiar and distinct to the English ear as any which our poets use. Now these are hexameters consisting each of five dactyls and a trochee,—the trochee approaching to a spondee, as I have seen; yet still, not being a spondee, but having its first syllable decidedly strong in comparison with the second.
The above hexameters are perfectly regular, both in being purely dactylic, and in having the regular cæsura, namely the end of a word at the beginning of the third dactyl, as—
We from the land that we love
We go as exiles away.
But these hexameters admit of irregularities in the same manner as the common English measures of which we have spoken. We may have dissyllable feet instead of trissyllable in any place in the line; thus in the fourth—