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There are hemistichs in Lucan that go to one's soul and one's heart; for a mere epic poem, a fabulous tissue of uninteresting battles that don't teach one even to fight, I know nothing more tedious. The poetic images, the versification and language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and can anything be more silly and unaffecting?
Besides, the Alexandrine with its couplets, with its hemistichs of equal length, is a very symmetrical and monotonous species of verse, and far better adapted for the expression of antithetical maxims, than for the musical delineation of passion with its unequal, abrupt, and erratic course of thoughts.
They both make hemistichs, or half-verses, breaking off in the middle of a line. I confess there are not many such in the "Faerie Queen," and even those few might be occasioned by his unhappy choice of so long a stanza. Mr.
This lively poem was composed by him on they occasion of the departure for Paris of a band of musicians, singers, and Aissaoua, who figured at the Exposition of 1867, under the direction of a professor of music named Salvador Daniel. The original is in couplets of six hemistichs. Perhaps they'll show themselves upon some stage Or elsewhere as his fancy leads.
If this part of his character suffers an abatement, it must be from the disproportion of his rhymes, which have not always sufficient consonance, and from the admission of broken lines into his "Solomon;" but perhaps he thought, like Cowley, that hemistichs ought to be admitted into heroic poetry.
It would have been better had it been less perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was enough in conscience; the Cremonæ afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun; and we have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up.
And, in the second place, I reasonably presume that he intended to have filled up all these hemistichs, because in one of them we find the sense imperfect: which some foolish grammarian has ended for him with a half-line of nonsense: "Peperit fumante Creusa." For Ascanius must have been born some years before the burning of that city, which I need not prove.
He pieces together in the straggling mosaic of his poem hemistichs from his contemporaries, fragments from Livy, words, thoughts, epithets, and rhythms from Virgil; and he elaborates the whole with a pre-Raphaelite fidelity to details which completely destroys whatever unity the subject suggested.
On these considerations I have shunned hemistichs, not being willing to imitate Virgil to a fault, like Alexander's courtiers, who affected to hold their necks awry because he could not help it.
He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn. 'By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines.
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