Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/153

MR. BRYANTS "HOMER" to our side of the argument by surpassing the excellence of Mr. Bryant's work. Asserting, then, that he has achieved a triumph in the only direction open at this period, we nevertheless venture to predict, that a resonant, swift metre will be developed, from elements now felt by our best poets to exist, which will have six accentual divisions, and hence may be called English hexameter verse; that it will partake of the quantitative nature of the intoned classical measures only through those natural dactyls not uncommon in our tongue, and through a resemblance which some of our trochees bear to the Greek spondaic feet; that it will be so much the more flexible, giving the poet liberty to shift his accents and now and then prefix redundant syllables; finally, that it often will have the billowy roll of the classical hexameter (as we moderns read the latter accentually), and by its form will be equal to the reproduction of Homer, line for line. If Mr. Taylor, who, by argument and practice, has proved the value of Form to the translator's work, can reach so near his mark in rendering the hundred metres of "Faust," surely there is encouragement for a future attempt to represent more closely the one defiant measure of heroic song. To the point made that English is too consonantal for such representation, we reply that it is no more consonantal in hexameter than in pentameter verse, and that, of the two kinds, the former is nearer to the verse of Homer. This objection would apply more forcibly to the still harsher German; yet we conceive Voss's Iliad to have given German readers a truer idea of the original than [139]