Such is the story of Evangeline; one of great beauty, however much it may suffer in this sketch of it. The poem is not of the highest class; there is no character portrayed, except that of Evangeline, and hers was nothing distinctive. But the beauty of the poem is in its graceful description, and its happy comparisons, verging something on prettinesses. As an instance of these last, we venture, perhaps at some hazard with our lady readers, to give the following:

"Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

Longfellow has, before this,

"Called the flowers, so blue and golden,

Stars, that in Earth's firmament do shine."

And, as that thought was not claimed to be his own, it was not worth while to attempt to make it his by reversing it; as a thief might turn a stolen coat wrong side out.

More beautiful, in our judgment, is the description of the Indian summer in Acadie, rich as it is with pastoral images; of the voyagers down the Mississippi; of the western residence of Basil; of the wondrous prairies.

"Billowy bays of grass ever rolling in shadow and sunshine,
Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas.
Over them wander the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck;

Over them wander wolves, and herds of riderless horses;

Fires that blast and blight and winds that are weary with travel.”
"And over all is the sky, the clear and crystalline heaven,

Like the protecting hand of God inverted above them."

But we have not room to select more passages. We can only hope that those which we have given will prevent any one from being deterred from the perusal of the volume by the unusual metre in which it is written, the classic hexameter.

There is another view in which we wish to consider this poem ; and that is as an attempt to introduce this metre into English verse. Longfellow is not the first who has made this attempt. As long ago as the Elizabethan age, Sir Philip Sydney used this metre himself, and encouraged its use in the writings of others. His hexameters, however, and those of his followers, were not, and never could have become, popular, for reasons which we will hereafter endeavor to explain. In modern times hexameters have been used by our poets with greater, but as yet not with general success. Coleridge wrote a few fragments in this measure, and Southey employed it in his Vision of Judgment. Longfellow himself, following the metre of the original, translated Teguer's Children of the Lord's Supper into, what he calls, "the inexorable hexameter." But the metre is not yet naturalized in our language; and it is. still a hazardous experiment to make it the vehicle of poetry. To use an expressive, though not very polished, phrase, English readers have not yet "got the hang of it." Both the Latinist and the

mere English scholar are puzzled by a metre, which is unlike anything with which either of them are familiar. Indeed it is difficult to say whether an English hexameter sounds more strangely to a classical or to an unclassical ear. Regular blank verse is the only metre without rhyme, which is familiar to one, whose acquaintance with the forms of poetry is confined to our own language. Southey's Thalaba and Shelley's Queen Mab seem to him, in their forms, to be very little more than melodious prose; like, though inferior to, those noble passages of the Psalms, in which the glorious sunlight of the thought shines through the clouds of a prose translation. He is then quite bewildered, when he finds a poem, without rhyme, in which the lines are of different lengths, and each contains more than ten syllables. To add to his perplexity, he is more conversant with iambic metre than with any other. Hence he cannot readily appreciate the dactylic rhythm of the hexameter. He opens Evangeline and reads thus:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks; and he sees at once that, thus read, it has indeed "the forced gait of a shuffling nag." Even if, by a little perseverance, he becomes somewhat familiar with the measure, yet he is very likely to read the poem with a continual grumble at such an awkward metre.

With different but equally strong prejudices the classic scholar takes up the book. Familiar with the melody of Homeric verse, he looks for the same here, with the added charm of a native language. He forgets for the moment the principles of English versification, and expects to find long syllables and short syllables, and, in brief, the application of all those rules of Latin prosody, which were whipped into him at school, and by which alone, he supposes, hexameters can be constructed. When then he finds that the lines before him are governed by none of these rules, he curls up his lips at English hexameters, and says that a line of Virgil is worth a thousand of them.

A measure better known would undoubtedly have made this poem more generally popular; still we are glad that Longfellow has made this experiment. It is only by such experiments that a new metre can be introduced into our language; and certainly the hexameter, if it can be made familiar to English ears, will enrich the language with a very melodious and very flexible metre ; entirely different in its character from our ordinary blank verse, and perhaps having an advantage over it in one respect. Ordinary blank verse is so consonant with the genius of our language, that, with slight alterations, the most common prose can be turned into verse. Thus we may take a passage from our author's preface to a volume of his poems, (though this, it is true, is not common prose,) and, by the aid of the italicised words, make verse of it: thus:

"And now the northern lights begin to burn
Faintly at first, like sunbeams playing soft
Within the waters of the deep, blue sea."

For the same reason it is difficult for even a skillful reader, except by awkward pauses, to show the termination of the lines, even in Milton's majestic verse; and still more so in the looser measure of modern poets. It is this, we may remark by the way, which may have led to the general and popular use of rhyme, marking as it does to the ear, the close of each line. The dactylic rhythm of the hexameter however, and the cadence of its last two feet, make it very different from English prose, and mark the verse as perfectly to the ear as to the eye.

It is our object in the remainder of this article to consider the attempt to introduce this metre into our language, and the principles which should govern it.

The Latin and Greek hexameter, like the other metres of those languages, was based upon the quantity, that is the length and shortness of the syllables. With this English metre has no connection. That regards only accented and unaccented syllables. Indeed in English it is often difficult to say whether a syllable is long or short. If we take the rules of Latin prosody as a test, we should find few short syllables; so seldom is there a vowel not followed by two consonants. Though there is this difference in the two systems of prosody, yet it should be observed that when an English scholar reads Latin verse, (and we select Latin as more easy of illustration) and wishes to show, or even to enjoy its melody, he reads it as if it were constructed upon the English system. The melody arising from the quantity of the syllables he can not appreciate; he must have that which comes from accent. Thus he would read,

Sícelidés Musaé, pauló majóra canàmus:
Nón omnés arbusta juvant humilésve myríc.

And so he must read if he would have the lines sound melodious;
although such reading violates the rules of Latin accent.
It may
be that such reading would have sounded harshly in Cicero's
ears; but it is certainly the most melodious mode of reading hex-
ameters which is in our power. So little does the quantity of the
syllables affect the metre to our ears, that

Sícelidés Musaé, pauló majóra cantémus
Nón omnés arbuta juvant humilésve myrícæ.

would be known to be bad lines, not by the effect on the ear, but by our knowledge of prosody. To one unacquainted with Latin, they would seem as correct, and perhaps as melodious, as the former couplet; and although the Latin scholar would detect the false quantity, he would do so by his head and not by his ear.

We would not deny that it may be possible for a well-trained scholar so to read Latin hexameters as to make them musical to modern ears, while he expresses the quantity by his voice, and yet observes the ordinary rules of modern Latin pronunciation. It is enough for our purpose that to the great body of those who read,

or have read, Virgil and Ovid, and other classic poets, the enjoyment of the metre arises and has arisen from the mode of reading which we have pointed out. It is through such persons, if at all, that hexameters must become popular in our language.

As a collateral illustration of our meaning, we may quote that noble old monkish hymn,

Dies iræ! dies illa,

Solvet sæclum in favilli,

Teste David cum Sibyllà.

Barbarous as this metre is when tested by the principles of Latin versification which governed classic poets, still to an English reader it is melodious and regular trochaic verse. A person unacquainted with Latin might make dies a monosyllable; but with this exception he would readily catch the rhythm. So too the Latin scholar can enjoy in these lines the modern metre of accent.

If we are correct in these remarks, it follows that there is nothing in the difference between the systems of Latin and of English versification which need prevent the introduction into English of the Latin hexameter. Goldsmith very truly said, that "it is impossible that the same measure, composed of the same times, should have a good effect upon the ear in one langusge and a bad effect in another." If, therefore, as we think we have shown, the Latin hexameter is pleasing when it is read according to the English system, marking its feet by accent and not by quantity; then hexameters may be constructed in English verse, which shall have the same pleasing effect. It may however be thought that the sounds of the Latin language are so different from those of the English, that there is no analogy between them in this respect. But a little examination will show that this difference is not very great. Of the fifteen syllables in

Arma virumque cano Trojæ, qui primus ab oris,

nine or ten will be found to be English words; and with a very little trouble a "nonsense verse" might be formed in English, whose sounds should be identical with those of the Latin line.

Nor is dactylic metre so rare in English verse as to make its use a novelty. Rhoderich Dhu's boat song is an example of this

metre.

Hail to the chief who in triumph advances!
Honored and blessed be the evergreen pine!
Long may the tree in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line! &c.

The first and third of these lines are even parts of regular hexameters. They are, in the language of Latin prosody, dactylic tetrameters a posteriore, being the last four feet of a hexameter; like the following lines from Horace.

Ibimus, O socii comitesque.
Quam domus Albune resonantis.

Let us now look at the manner in which the attempt to introduce this metre has been made. Sydney, one of the first who wrote in this metre, followed an entirely erroneous system. He attempted to ingraft, not only the metre but also the mode of constructing it. He endeavored to base his metre, not on accent but on quantity, and to govern English hexameters by the rules of Latin prosody. This was contrary to the principles of our language, and therefore impossible. No one can read, as we have marked it, the following line, one of his hexameters,

Oppressed with ruinous conceits by the help of an outery,

Lines like this, though correct enough hexameters in Latin, are poor prose in English. Add to this the forced style in which his hexameters were written, and there is no difficulty in seeing that they could not be popular.

It is interesting to observe, however, that those of his lines, in which there is no violation of English pronunciation, are more melodious than most of those which have been written upon the other and the true system; a fact to which we shall have occasion to refer. Thus, in the following, if the words "rivers" and "greyhound" be accented on the last syllable of each, and the word "solemnize" on its penult, the passage, if not very poetical, will be found at least quite melodious.

First shall fertile grounds not yield increase of a good seed;
First the rivers shall cease to repay their floods to the ocean;
First may a trusty greyhound transform himself to a tiger;

First shall virtue be vice and beauty be counted a blemish;

Ere that I leave with song of praise her praise to solemnize.

Southey, in his Vision of Judgment, adopted different and more correct principles of versification. Disregarding entirely the rules of Latin prosody, he formed his verse according to accent; following in this the ordinary rules of English verse. He varied from the Latin hexameter in often, and perhaps generally, using a trochee in the place of the spondee. This however is not as great a variation as it might at first seem. When we mark the feet of Latin hexameters, as it has been shown that we do, by accent, spondees sound very much like trochees. For in our reading the spondee is made to consist of two syllables, the first accented and the second unaccented; and this forms a trochee. Thus the line,

Humano capití cervicem pictor equinam,

sounds nearly, if not quite, as it would were the first and fourth feet trochees.