Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/151

MR. BRYANTS "HOMER" the two lines of which it consists, which is wholly foreign to the Homeric style." Professor Hadley has suggested that this may be obviated by a return to the measure as written by Chaucer, not pausing too often at the rhymes, but frequently running the sentences over, with the cæsura varied as in blank-verse. This usage, in fact, was revived by Keats and Leigh Hunt, and is notable, of late, in William Morris's flowing poetry, to which Mr. Hadley refers for illustration. Chapman translated the Odyssey upon this plan, but in a slovenly fashion, not to be compared with his other Homeric work. There is room, perhaps, for a new translation of Homer into the rhymed Chaucerian verse.

Lastly, and at the risk of losing the regard of the reader who may have gone with us thus far, we have a word to say in behalf of that much-abused form of verse known as the "English hexameter": a measure far more out of favor with the critics than with the poets or the majority of their readers. Before its name even was known in this country to other than scholars, Mr. Longfellow's "Evangeline" appeared, and found its way to the public heart as no American poem of equal length ever had done before. Our people made no difficulty in reading it, troubling themselves very little with the strictures of classical reviewers, and it has not yet outlived its original welcome.

The fact is that, to properly estimate the so-called English hexameter, one must, to a certain extent, get the Greek and Latin quantities out of his mind. [137]