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Updated: June 19, 2025
The English verse which we call heroic consists of no more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for example, this verse in Virgil: "Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum." Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line betwixt the English and the Latin.
Lucretius' choice of the hexameter, and his definite conquest of it as a medium of the richest and most varied expression, placed the matter beyond recall.
The vision steals upon you at all hours, now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the glorious dashes of tragic verse. Yet with the exception of stolen glances and secret admiration, you keep aloof. There is no wish to fathom what seems a happy mystery. There lies a content in secret obeisance.
Hence the rude rhythmical effusions, which contained the early Roman story, might be called Saturnian, not with reference to their metrical law, but to their antiquity; and the term Saturnius was also applied to a definite measure on the principles of Greek prosody, though rudely and loosely moulded the measure employed by Naevius, which soon became antiquated, when Ennius introduced the hexameter and which is the metrum Saturnium recognised by the grammarians."
Three of these are pieces in hexameter verse, belonging broadly to the class of the epyllion, or "little epic," which was invented as a convenient term to include short poems in the epic metre that were not definitely pastorals either in subject or treatment, and which the Alexandrian poets, headed by Theocritus, had cultivated with much assiduity and considerable success.
Besides, how do we know, after all, that the Greeks did not read their one hexameter like two lines, with a decided pause at the cæsura, with the additional grace of the short syllable at its end often passing the voice into the second part, or, as we may call it in the argument, the second line?
I presume that the monosyllable, rhyme, comprehends pretty nearly all that the world at large intends by poetry; and, in the same manner as certain critics have sneered at Livy no, it was Tacitus for commencing his work with a bad hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn a whole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of harbouring a distich.
We think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of phrase. But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles Standish."
Accordingly, all his Latin poems in that kind of verse having been included in the Elegiarum Liber, all his other Latin poems, not in that kind of verse, but either in Hexameter pure or in rarer metres, together with two fragments of Greek verse, are regarded as "Sylvae," and constitute the distinct SYLVARUM LIBER which ends the volume.
Herminia knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos." But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a yellow English primrose.
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