Busily plied the freighted boats; and in the confusion]
Wives were torn from their husbands, | and mothers, | too late, |

saw their children

570

Left on the land, | extending their arms, with wildest entreaties.

So unto separate ships] were Basil and Gabriel carried, Į While in despair on the shore | Evangeline stood with her father.||

Half the task was not done | when the sun went down, and the twilight

Deepened and darkened around; and in haste the refluent

ocean

575

Fled away from the shore, | and left the line of the sandbeach Covered with waifs of the tide, with kelp and the slippery seaweed.

Farther back in the midst of the household goods and the wagons,

Like to a gypsy camp, or a leaguer after a battle, [
All escape cut off by the sea, and the sentinels near them, 580
Lay encamped for the night | the homeless Acadian farmers.

Here double, single, and half strokes are intended to give a clew to the length of the pause. It will be noticed that enjambement, or the linking of verses together, has much to do with elocution. Verse structure and sentence structure may correspond: 11. 171, 382, 509, 568, 624, 863, etc. In such a case the sentence is usually a topic sentence. But as a rule the sentence is carried on from one verse to another, and this necessitates pauses of varying length at the end of the lines. For instance, 11. 569 and

570 are not so closely connected as are 11. 570 and 571: the prepositional phrase in 1. 569 would be followed by a pause even in prose; the word left, 1. 571, cannot be so separated from the group immediately preceding it. Notice 11. 574-5, 578-9. Further illustrations will be found in 11. 53-4, 83–4, 100–1, 137-8, 270-1, 561–2, 565-6.

The scansion of the line offers few difficulties. In general, a safe rule to follow is, accent the first syllable and the rest will take care of itself.

A word must be said of the English hexameter. Although Longfellow was not the first to use it, he did more than any other to establish it among our poetic forms, and, consequently, came in for some harsh criticism. The argument is briefly as follows: in Latin and Greek the principle of verse is quantity, in English it is accent; the classic hexameter invariably ends with two long syllables (spondee), exactly equivalent in time to the dactyl, and the same combination may be substituted for the dactyl in certain other positions in the verse; in English the spondee must be represented by the trochee; the classic hexameter cannot, therefore, be reproduced in English. Occasionally the effect of the spondee may be suggested, when two words having equal or nearly equal sentence stress are brought together: 11. 47, 166, 185, 274, 308, 345, etc. But such occurrences are rare. Still it is hardly worth while to argue the case; Long

fellow adopted the measure, and the poems clothed in it cannot be annihilated by a technical objection. In so far as Evangeline is concerned, the lingering lines harmonize with the melancholy tone of the story. A nice taste, whether or not it can distinguish between quantity and accent, is nevertheless offended by the hexameter; and the reason was hinted at by Holmes, when he wrote to the author, "It marks the transition of prose into verse." In the character of the 'Autocrat,' Holmes might have been tempted to transpose two very important words in the sentence.