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Updated: April 30, 2025
My desk was full of them in time sonnets, scraps of songs, fragments of blank verse, attempts in all sorts of queer and rugged metres hexameters, pentameters, alcaics, and the like; with, here and there, a dialogue out of an imaginary tragedy, or a translation from some Italian or German poet. This taste grew by degrees, to be a rare and subtle pleasure to me.
In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet. How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style?
Gozzi's so-called fiabe belonged to this class. They had had a great though short-lived vogue at Venice, and this had led to a German translation in prose by a man named Werthes. What Schiller did was to turn the prose of Werthes into pentameters of the style that he had made peculiarly his own.
Their classical acquirements made them conspicuous even among the women of fashion of that age. Katherine, who became Lady Killigrew, wrote Latin Hexameters and Pentameters which would appear with credit in the Musae Etonenses. Mildred, the wife of Lord Burleigh, was described by Roger Ascham as the best Greek scholar among the young women of England, Lady Jane Grey always excepted.
He showed them up, and would have got some noted good mark, but that, by great good luck, Ethel had made two of her pentameters too short, which he hadn't the wit to find out, thinking all Norman did must be right. So he has shown up a girl's verses isn't that rare?" cried Harry, dancing on his chair with triumph. "I hope no one knows they were hers?"
Wallace, and if you will not work in your holidays, you will have to do so in your play-hours." Jack retired to his seat, and for the next ten minutes indulged in a diatribe against classical learning in general, and hexameters and pentameters in particular. Presently one of the sixth form came down to where Jack was sitting, "Archer, Dr. Wallace wants you."
In what makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme.
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley. "How do you like your work?" asked the doctor. "It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps."
Of an entirely different character is the version of Racine's 'Phedre', which, as we have seen, was finished a few weeks before Schiller's death. Here we have for the first time what can properly be called a poetic translation. To a large extent Schiller's version is a line-for-line rendering of the French alexandrines into German pentameters, a thing by no means easy to do.
But the best of all perhaps was the oft-quoted gem: In Weimar and in Jena they make hexameters like this, But the pentameters are even more excellent. Historians of German literature are probably right in believing that the Xenia fusillade produced on the whole a salutary effect, although many of the objects of attack seem, at this date, to have been hardly worth the ammunition.
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