Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/256

 238 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. hair, and he thrust back his sword into its sheath. He also yielded up Briseis. Achilles' deepest pas- sions were his love for Patroclus, his grief for him slain, and his rage against the slayer. Even this grief and wrath find their cadences and final calm. Once the hero feared lest, passion mastering restraint, he should do a shameful act — so he warns Priam. ^ The passions of the epics were fitted to the mighty but finite hexameter. They were like the waves of ocean, which never lose their measure of rise and fall, never lose their metre, be it of calm or storm. Achilles' anger and the torrent of his grief and wrath, rising, falling, and again rising, resistless but not unre- strained, ever roll within the harmonies of the metre. The elegiac metre likewise accords with the meas- ured grief which is its burden. Its couplets are com- posed of a hexameter and a pentameter, that is to say, a hexameter in which the unemphatic second half of the third foot is omitted, as well as the first syllable of the sixth foot, which would have been a spondee. The result is a solemn slowing of the move- ment in the middle of the line, and an increase of stress upon the final syllable by the omission of the long syllable before it. The pause in the middle of the pentameter and the stress at its close make it the emphatic line of the elegiac couplet. The hexameter is the preparation, the anacrusis, as it were ; while the weight of sententiousness, when the couplet is gnomic, and the stress of the feeling, when the couplet is proper elegy, fall on the pentameter, and some- times with marked emphasis upon the last syllable of 1 II., XXIV, 560.