But besides all this, spondees are not only more prevalent in the
heroic hexameter than dactyls, but occur to such an extent as is
even unpleasant to modern ears, on account of monotony. What the
modern chiefly appreciates and admires in the Greek hexameter is the
melody of the abundant vowel sounds. The Latin hexameters really
please very few moderns- although so many pretend to fall into
ecstasies about them. In the hexameters quoted several pages ago, from
Silius Italicus, the preponderance of the spondee is strikingly
manifest. Besides the natural spondees of the Greek and Latin,
numerous artificial ones arise in the verse of these tongues, on
account of the tendency which inflection has to throw full
accentuation on terminal syllables, and the preponderance of the
spondee is further ensured by the comparative infrequency of the small
prepositions which we have to serve us instead of case, and also the
absence of the diminutive auxiliary verbs with which we have to eke
out the expression of our primary ones. These are the monosyllables
whose abundance serves to stamp the poetic genius of a language as
tripping or dactylic.
Now paying no attention to these facts, Sir Philip Sidney, Professor
Longfellow, and innumerable other persons, more or less modern, have
busied themselves in constructing what they supposed to be "English
hexameters on the model of the Greek.
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