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Hexameter   Listen
noun
Hexameter  n.  (Gr. & Lat. Pros.) A verse of six feet, the first four of which may be either dactyls or spondees, the fifth must regularly be a dactyl, and the sixth always a spondee. In this species of verse are composed the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil. In English hexameters accent takes the place of quantity. "Leaped like the | roe when he | hears in the | woodland the | voice of the | huntsman." "Strongly it | bears us a- | long on | swelling and | limitless | billows, Nothing be- | fore and | nothing be- | hind but the | sky and the | ocean."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hexameter" Quotes from Famous Books



... rewards and punishments. Although it was purely Grecian in its origin and development, it became one of the grand ornaments of the Roman schools. The Romans did not originate medicine, but Galen was one of its greatest lights; they did not invent the hexameter verse, but Virgil sang to its measure; they did not create Ionic capitals, but their cities were ornamented with marble temples on the same principles as those which called out the admiration of Pericles. So, if they did not originate philosophy, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... still justified. In religious ceremonies or in formal intercourse with his clergy he was the most imposing and sacerdotal of bishops; but in private life none knew better how to disguise his cloth. He was moreover a man of parts, and from the construction of a Latin hexameter to the growing of a Holland bulb, had a word worth hearing on all subjects likely to engage the dilettante. A liking soon sprang up between Odo and this versatile prelate; and in the retirement of his lordship's cabinet, or pacing with him the garden-alleys set ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... foot, and some or all of the preceding, as the case may be, being trochees. (Rengifo, Arte Poetica Espanola, (Barcelona, 1727,) cap. 9, 44.) Critics have derived this delightful measure from various sources. Sarmiento traces it to the hexameter of the ancient Romans, which may be bisected into something analogous to the redondillas. (Memorias, pp. 168-171.) Bouterwek thinks it may have been suggested by the songs of the Roman soldiery. (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... man never faltered, nor suffered others about him to falter,—Themistocles. The people heard him gladly—he would never talk of defeat. He had a thousand reasons why the invader should be baffled, from a convenient hexameter in old Bacis's oracle book, up to the fact that the Greeks used the longest spears. If he found it weary work looking the crowding peril in the face and smiling still, he never confessed it. His friends would ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... who charge Rueckert with never having produced "a whole," have certainly forgotten one of his works,—"The Wisdom of the Brahmin, a Didactic Poem, in Fragments." The title somewhat describes its character. The "fragments" are couplets, in iambic hexameter, each one generally complete in itself, yet grouped in sections by some connecting thought, after the manner of the stanzas of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." There are more than six thousand couplets, in all, divided into twenty books,—the whole forming a mass of poetic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... rude dialogues, in which the country people assailed and ridiculed one another in extempore verses, and which were introduced as an amusement in various festivals. They were formed into the Satire[75] by C. LUCILIUS, who wrote in hexameter verse, and attacked the follies and vices both of distinguished persons and of mankind in general. He was born B.C. 148, at Suessa Aurunca, and died at Naples in B.C. 103. He lived upon terms of intimacy with the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... found near Cirencester proves that place to have been in Britannia Prima. It is figured by Haverfield ('Eng. Hist. Rev.' July 1896), and runs as follows: Septimius renovat Primae Provinciae Rector Signum et erectam prisca religione columnam. This is meant for two hexameter lines, and refers to Julian's revival ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... scene before us spread Where Freedom's full hexameter began— Restore our Epic, which the Nations read As far its ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope

... writings, and is intolerant of innovation. Those who come under its influence are dissuaded or deterred from striking out a path of their own. Thus Virgil's transcendent excellence fixed the character of the hexameter in subsequent poetry, and took away the chances, if not of improvement, at least of variety. Even Juvenal has much of Virgil in the structure of his verse. I have known those who prefer the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... only artificial stanza of English origin that has ever passed into currency. [Footnote: Note that this is not inconsistent with what is said above, p. 102, of the sonnet.] The rime-scheme is ababbcbcc, and in the last line the iambic pentameter gives place to an Alexandrine (an iambic hexameter). Whether or not any stanza form is as well adapted as blank verse or the rimed couplet for prolonged narrative is an interesting question, but there can be no doubt that Spenser's stanza, firmly unified, in spite of its length, by its central couplet and by the finality of the last line, is a ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... You fancy that you hear the people talking. For a contrary reason, no college-man writes a good style, or understands it when written. Fine writing is with him all verbiage and monotony—a translation into classical centos or hexameter lines. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... many incoherent Words, appear to the Eye somewhat like a Fortune-telling Screen. What a Joy must it be to the unlearned Operator to find that these Words, being carefully collected and writ down in Order according to the Problem, start of themselves into Hexameter and Pentameter Verses? A Friend of mine, who is a Student in Astrology, meeting with this Book, performed the Operation, by the Rules there set down; he shewed his Verses to the next of his Acquaintance, who happened to understand Latin; and being informed they described ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... acquiring its literary sense, though this is not yet fixed definitely. In his account of the three ancient tripods dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Thebes,[1] he says of one of them, {o men de eis ton tripodon epigramma ekhei}, and then quotes the single hexameter line engraved upon it. Of the other two he says simply, "they say in hexameter," {legei en exametro tono}. Again, where he describes the funeral monuments at Thermopylae,[2] he uses the words {gramma} and {epigramma} almost in the sense of sepulchural epigrams; {epigegrammai grammata legonta ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... maiden's consent as well as her father's (who was an artist) he forsook his trade, devoted himself to painting, and became a great master in his art. On the tombstone which his admirers placed on his grave a hundred years after his death, stands the Latin hexameter: ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... Saint Martial de Limoges contains this passage (Paris, Bibl. Nat., No. 2400.) "Adrian II., after the example of his predecessor of the same name, completed the Gregorian Antiphoner in several places. He also arranged a second prologue in hexameter verse to be chanted at High Mass on the first day of Advent. This prologue begins in the same way as another very short one composed by the first Adrian to be sung at all the Masses of this first Sunday in Advent, but that of ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt

... without interest to call the reader's attention to the fact that "Fulget hon|orifi |cabili|tudini|tatibus|iste" forms a neat Latin hexameter. It will be found that the revelation derived from the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus is itself also in the form ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence

... Edmund Spenser and employed by him in the "Faerie Queene," is a difficult but effective form of poetry. It consists of nine verses, the first eight being iambic pentameter, and the ninth line iambic hexameter, or Alexandrine. Its rhyme scheme is a b a b b c b c c. The following from Byron's "Childe Harold" will serve ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... sad discredit in this country, years after this, though Columbia and Harvard were a little in advance of Yale. All that was ever done in the last college, during the writer's time, was to scan the ordinary hexameter of Homer ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... I thought it a very sonorous hexameter. I did not tell him, it was not in the Virgilian style. He much regretted that his FIRST tutor was dead; for whom he seemed to retain the greatest regard. He said, "I once had been a whole morning sliding in Christ-Church Meadow, and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... have the most perfect metre, the hexameter, which is also called heroic. It is called hexameter because each line has six feet: one of these is of two long syllables, called spondee; the other, of three syllables, one long and two short, which is called dactyl. Both are isochronic. These in interchangeable order fill out the hexameter ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... public from an explanation of the ways of true Wisdom than from little trifles about Latin.' Much more in the same strain; and S. H. [Samuel Hartlib] added, 'Quo, moriture, ruis? minoraque viribus audes?' in this poetical solecism [Comenius calls the hexameter a solecism, I suppose, on account of the false quantity it contains in the word minora], reproaching my inconsiderateness. Rejoiced by this recall into the road-royal, I sent on this letter to Sweden; and, nothing ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... said to the others, 'has miraculously been able to put the whole meaning of the seven thousand lines of Greek invocation into one English hexameter—a little misplaced some of ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... Vergil. The breaking up of the matter into stanzas, each having a unity of its own, led to additions, omissions and perversions,—there are 2104 lines in the translation to 1509 in the original,—and substituted an interrupted romantic cadence for the stately continuous roll of the hexameter. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... B.C. 630), the age of Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music—the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase not altogether suitable, yet ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... that he did much, but there was a general determination that he could do a great deal if he chose. "Ah, if Pendennis of Boniface would but try," the men said, "he might do anything." He was backed for the Greek Ode won by Smith of Trinity; everybody was sure he would have the Latin hexameter prize which Brown of St. John's, however, carried off, and in this way one university honour after another was lost by him, until, after two or three failures, Mr. Pen ceased to compete. But he got a declamation prize in his own college, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... who lived at Chios [Ki'.os]. At least Chios was one of the seven cities which laid claim to the bard, according to the Latin hexameter verse: ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One knows—at least every schoolboy has known—that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets; that the fiftieth reading ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... and the "History of his own Life," which he continued in thirteen books, as far as the Cantabrian war, but no farther. He likewise made some attempts at poetry. There is extant one book written by him in hexameter verse, of which both the subject and title is "Sicily." There is also a book of Epigrams, no larger than the last, which he composed almost entirely while he was in the bath. These are all his poetical compositions for though he begun a tragedy with great zest, becoming dissatisfied with ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... Deduct all you can, that still keeps you at bay; Why, he'll live till men weary of Collins and Gray. I'm not over-fond of Greek metres in English, To me rhyme's a gain, so it be not too jinglish, And your modern hexameter verses are no more Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer; 1320 As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is, So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes; I may be too partial, the reason, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... over." This passage is an absolute abridgment of many chapters of Carpini. Still more terse was the sketch of Mongol proceedings drawn by a fugitive from Bokhara after Chinghiz's devastations there. It was set forth in one unconscious hexameter: ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... Homeric translation,) and partly on the particular merits of Mr. Newman's attempt as compared with those of others. Of course, many side-topics are incidentally touched upon, among others, the English hexameter, Mr. Newman's objections to which are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... older than the second part, which was written probably as a sequel to the early hymn. The rhythm of the hymn is very beautiful, being free from abruptness and monotony. Students of poetry may note that seven lines have the exact hexameter ending, if scanned accentually, as voce proclamant; Deus sabbaoth, etc. Seven have two dactyls, as laudabilis numerus, laudat exercitus; one ends with spondees, apostolorum chorus. The other six lines have a less ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... The heavy curls of his hair had come unbound and fell over his flushed face. When he hit one of the Imperial soldiers his father applauded him eagerly; then, collecting all his strength, flung another lance, chanting a hexameter or a verse of an ode. Herse crouched half hidden behind a sacrificial stone which lay at the top of the hastily-constructed rampart, and handed weapons to the combatants as they needed them. Her dress was torn and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... on his worn-out recollections of the Peninsular War, and becomes savage if you broach a new theme, or move to adjourn the debate; the university pedant distracts you with his theories on philology and scansion—with his amended translation of a hexameter in Persius, and his new reading of a line in Theocritus; the bagman is all for 'the shop;' the policeman is redolent of the 'lock-up house 'and 'your wertchup;' the tailor is profoundly knowing on the 'sweating system; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... six terms in it. The true name for the fallacy therefore is the Fallacy of More than Three Terms. But it is rare to find an attempted syllogism which has more than four terms in it, just as we are seldom tendered a line as an hexameter, which has ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... [short-short-long], the Trochee [long-short], the Dactyl [long-short-short], and the Spondee [long-long]. Then we were instructed that a "verse" or line consisting of one foot was called a monometer, of two feet, a dimeter, of three, a trimeter, of four, a tetrameter, of five, a pentameter, of six, a hexameter. This looked like a fairly easy game, and before long we were marking the quantities in the first line of the Aeneid, as other school-children had done ever since the time ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... et ament meminisse periti (Let the unlearned learn, and the learned delight in remembering). This Latin hexameter, which is commonly ascribed to Horace, appeared for the first time as an epigraph to President Henault's "Abrege Chronologique," and in the preface to the third edition of this work Henault acknowledges that he had given it as a translation ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... letters and certain sonnets," containing valuable notices of contemporary poets. He also prefixed a poem entitled Hobbinol, to the Faery Queene. But Harvey most deserves our notice because he was the champion of the hexameter verse in English, and imbued even Spenser ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... remember numbers, as of the eras, or dates of history. This was done by substituting one consonant and one vowel for each figure of the ten cyphers used in arithmetic, and by composing words of these letters; which words Mr. Grey makes into hexameter verses, and produces an audible jargon, which is to be committed to memory, and occasionally analysed into numbers when required. An ingenious French botanist, Monsieur Bergeret, has proposed to apply this idea of Mr. Grey to a botanical nomenclature, by making the name of each plant to consist ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... the tale of a love "that hopes and endures and is patient." The metrical form, dactylic hexameter, is one that few of our poets have successfully used, and many have thought it wholly unfitted to English verse. Longfellow has certainly disproved their theory, for his success with this meter is pronounced. The long, flowing ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... was just going into battle, and must not take aught to weaken his powers. Now, if the soupe au vin had been known in Troy, it is clear that in declining vinum merum upon that score, he would have added in the hexameter, 'But a soupe au vin, madam, I will degust, and gratefully.' Not only would this have been but common civility—a virtue no perfect commander is wanting in—but not to have done it would have proved him a ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... verses is used in the epitaphs, but the dactylic hexameter and the elegiac are the favorites. The stately character of the hexameter makes it a suitable medium in which to express a serious sentiment, while the sudden break in the second verse of the elegiac couplet suggests the emotion of the writer. The verses are constructed ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... purveyors of parts: however, she did not only act in plays written for her: her mixed repertory ranged from Ibsen to Sardou, from Gabriele d'Annunzio to Dumas fils, from Bernard Shaw to the latest Parisian playwrights. Upon occasion she would even venture into the Versailles' avenues of the classic hexameter, or on to the deluge of images of Shakespeare. But she was ill at ease in that galley, and her audience was even more so. Whatever she played, she played herself, nothing but herself, always. It was both her weakness and her strength. Until the public had been awakened to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... three letters "Deo Optimo Maximo," and says the subsequent line contains the initials of the following hexameter: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various

... prefixed to Master Tom Coryate's Crudities, published in 1611. Even in those days it will be admitted that the English were rather fond of such things, and glorious Will himself bears testimony to the fact. (See Tempest, Act II. Sc. 2.) The hexameter verses are anonymous; perhaps one of your well-read antiquaries may be able to assign to them the author, and be disposed to annotate them. I would particularly ask when was Drake's ship broken up, and is there any date on the chair[1] made from the wood, which is now ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various

... 1. O TITE etc.: the lines are a quotation from the Annales of Q. Ennius (born at Rudiae in Calabria 239 B.C., died 169), an epic poem in hexameter verse, the first great Latin poem in that metre, celebrating the achievements of the Roman nation from the time of Aeneas to the poet's own days. The incident alluded to in Ennius' verses is evidently the same as that narrated by Livy 32, cc. 9, 10. Titus ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... supposed to have been sold to Tarquinius Superbus by the Sibyl of Cumae: they were written in Greek hexameter verses. In times of emergency and distress they were consulted and interpreted by special priests ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... Hyperion and Kavanagh, and a few dramas, all of which deserve to rank with the best American productions. Evangeline is considered "to be the most perfect specimen of the rhythm and melody of the English hexameter." He died at Cambridge, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... 'Golden-mouthed,' and that the style of metre adopted 'carries the ear back to times in the world's history when grand simplicities were sung.' Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all between Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer's or Virgil's line? Where also lies the advantage of confusing popularity with poetic power? Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to California, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... Klopstock can be naturalized without strangeness, and his peculiarities retained without affectation; that quaintness, the unavoidable companion of neologism, is as needless to genius, as hostile to grace; the hexameter, until it is familiar, must repel, and, when it is familiar, may annoy; that it wants a musical orderliness of sound; and that its cantering capricious movement opposes the grave march of solemn majesty, and better suits the ordinary ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... to be dictated by the God. The questions which were offered by those who came to consult the oracle were then proposed to her, and her answers taken down by the priest, whose office was to arrange and methodize them, and put them into hexameter verse, after which they were delivered to the votaries. The priestess could only be consulted on one day ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... Bible—minutely on niceties of conduct or broadly on first principles of philosophy or religion. But equally, since it is poetry all the time to him, he will take—or to instance particular writers, Aristotle and the late Greek, Longinus will take—a single hexameter to illustrate a minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he will choose a long passage or the whole "Iliad," the whole "Odyssey," to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, a first principle of aesthetics. For an example—'Herein,' says Aristotle, starting to show ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... Heraclitus and the Greek historian Hecataeeus, who wrote a history of the world, passages which glorify the Hebrew people and the Hebrew God were ascribed. Still more daring was the conversion into archaic hexameter verse of the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles. The Sibyl, whom the superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of prehistoric ages, was made to recite the building of the tower of Babel, or the virtues of ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... was applied equally to the minstrel who recited his own poems, and to him who declaimed anew songs that had been heard a thousand times before. The form of these heroic songs, probably settled and fixed by tradition, was the hexameter, as this metre gave to the epic poetry repose, majesty, a lofty and solemn tone, and rendered it equally adapted to the pythoness who announced the decrees of the deity, and to the rhapsodist who recited the battles of heroes. The ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... more or less caustic epigrams amused them. Sometimes one would suggest the topic and the other write the distich; again, one would do the hexameter, the other the pentameter. They agreed that neither should ever claim separate property in the Xenia, as they were called. The number grew apace, until it reached nearly a thousand. About half the number on hand were published in 1797 in Schiller's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... call heroic consists of no more than ten syllables; the Latin hexameter sometimes rises to seventeen; as, for example, this ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... an unfortunate hiatus in his education, did not know what a hexameter might be, he was artist enough to comprehend the effect of attire on creative work, for he had noticed that he himself could make more money in one necktie than in another, and he would instinctively take particular care in the morning ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... faced both ways, like those Hermae which are made double, alike whether you look at front or back. Consider; will Croesus's passage of the Halys destroy his own realm, or Cyrus's? Tet the wretched Sardian paid a long price for his ambidextrous hexameter. ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long, and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, whose descendants are still ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... there was an attempt to justify the inclusion of translations of the Psalms among other metrical experiments. Googe, defending the having of the Psalms in metre, declares that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other parts of the Bible "were written by the first authors in perfect and pleasant hexameter verses."[246] Stanyhurst[247] and Fraunce[248] both tried putting the Psalms into English hexameters. There was, however, no accurate knowledge of the Hebrew verse system. The preface to the American Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640,[249] explains that "The psalms are penned in ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... perfect hexameter.* I feel not in me those sordid and unchristian desires of my profession; I do not secretly implore and wish for plagues, rejoice at famines, revolve ephemerides and almanacks in expectation of malignant aspects, fatal conjunctions, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement and a pathos, which have charmed all subsequent ages. Homer, far more than any other author, was the educator of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... of the conventional pastoral did not, indeed, pass altogether unnoticed in their own day, for early in the sixteenth century Teofilo Folengo composed his Zanitonella in macaronic verse. It consists of eclogues and poems in hexameter and elegiac metre ridiculing polite pastoralism through contrast with the crudities of actual rusticity. In the same manner Berni travestied the courtly pastoral of vernacular writers in his realistic pictures of village love. But though the satirist might find ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... look from these serious strains of their youth to the literary expression of the gayer side of character in the two friends, we find Addison sheltering his taste for playful writing behind a Roman Wall of hexameter. For among his Latin poems in the Oxford 'Musae Anglicanae' are eighty or ninety lines of resonant Latin verse upon 'Machinae Gesticulantes, 'anglice' A Puppet-show.' Steele, taking life as he found it, and expressing mirth in his own way of conversation, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... has been characterised as "simple, musical, sincere, sympathetic, clear as crystal, and pure as snow." He has written in a great variety of measures— in more, perhaps, than have been employed by Tennyson himself. His "Evangeline" is written in a kind of dactylic hexameter, which does not always scan, but which is almost always ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... descriptions, bore much resemblance to those of Homer and that the rapid flow of Scott's verse was happily accommodated to the swift succession of events, and fiery impetuosity of the Iliad; corresponding with the dactylic hexameter of the old poet. These hints induced the author to attempt ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker

... fishing match between Antony and Cleopatra, which has been utilized by Shakespeare. Moreover, it is in Greek that the first complete treatise on fishing which has come down to us is written, the Halieutica of Oppian (c. A.D. 169). It is a hexameter poem in five books with perhaps more technical than sporting interest, and not so much even of that as the length of the work would suggest. Still it contains some information about tackle and methods, and some passages describing battles with big fish, in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... tufted gillyflowers, to the bare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-colored,—the famous white steers of Clitumnus. 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 ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... the first extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C., devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, and imitates him in what is probably the earliest, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... specifically literary works have all perished. A few sentences from his speeches, a few of his letters, a few wise or witty sayings, an anecdote or two scattered about in the pages of other authors, and six lines of hexameter verse, containing a critical estimate of the dramatist Terence, are all that remain as specimens of what is probably forever lost ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... his day, and was often called upon to write pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions. He sometimes used Hexameter ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... twentiethly" we learn that "there is no Hexameter, Elegiack, Saphick, Asclepiad, lambick, or any other kind of Latin or Greek verse, but I will afford you another in this language of the same ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... and he adds:—"If any one who happens to live in some place remote from the city wishes to get a clear notion of every part, as though he were there, let him read what Paulus [Silentiarius] has composed in hexameter verse." ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Poet-Laureate) writes to say that, having given special study to the hexameter, he was much interested to find that the measure now in vogue amongst bishops was that of six feet and over. He hoped to treat the subject exhaustively in his forthcoming treatise on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various

... Augustus, which, when nobody was found to own it, was claimed by a certain versifier Bathyllus, whom Caesar duly rewarded, A few days later, however, Virgil again set in the same place a quatrain each line of which commenced 'sic vos non vobis...' but was unfinished, and preceeded these by the one hexameter ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... not acquit me of treason," because he means to infer that his condemnation was really in place of Gabinius, whose acquittal had irritated his jury; therefore he was practically convicted of maiestas instead of his patron Gabinius. I have, accordingly, ventured to elicit the end of a hexameter from the Greek letters of the MS., of which no satisfactory account has been given, and to read Itaque dixit statim "respublica lege maiestatis [Greek: ou soi ken ar' isa m' apheie] (or [Greek: aphie])." The quotation is not known. ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... in hexameter verse, in good Greek, addressed to King Ptolemy, in which he calls, not only upon Apollo and the Muse, but, like a true Egyptian, upon Hermes, from whose darkly worded writings he had gained his knowledge. He says that the king's ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... religious history of the war. It would seem that the extraordinary series of performances ordered during the depression and despair that followed Cannae had succeeded for the time in quieting the religio. Fabius Pictor too had returned from Delphi,[690] and brought home in what seems to be hexameter verse instructions as to the worship of certain deities, with injunctions to the Romans to send gifts to the Pythian Apollo if prosperity should return to them, and ending with the significant words, "lasciviam (disorderly excitement) a vobis prohibete," ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact." Many—very many—similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... stanza is passed over almost without a word of comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... writers. However this may be, there is no doubt that, together with the decline of antique civilisation, accent and rhythm began to displace quantity and metre in Latin versification. Quantitative measures, like the Sapphic and Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... chiefly famous as a caustic pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist. For illustration we may point to his battle with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Edmund Spenser, who desired that he might be epitaphed the inventor of the not yet naturalized English hexameter; and his other battle with Martin Mar Prelate, or the writer or writers who passed under that name, and who have acquired a reputation to which poor Nash can lay no claim. His one conspicuous dramatic effort is 'Summer's Last Will and Testament.' Nash wrote for bare ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie

... religious and ecclesiastical. Of the greatest interest for us are his Riddles. These are short Latin poems somewhat after the model of Symphosius, whose work he describes,[60] and whom he seems ambitious to outstrip. The riddles of Symphosius are uniformly of three hexameter lines, those of Aldhelm vary in length from four lines to sixteen; rarely more. The external structure is that of the Epigram, with the object speaking in the first person. The riddles both of Symphosius and Aldhelm are so closely identified with ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... and one form of verse or many): this art has no name up to the present (i.e. there is no name to cover mimes and dialogues and any similar imitation made in iambics, elegiacs, &c. Commonly people attach the 'making' to the metre and say 'elegiac-makers', 'hexameter-makers,' giving them a common class-name by their metre, as if it was not their imitation ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... you must sing it with long-drawn emphasis on each word, lengthening it into at least two syllables; the first a sort of hexameter, the second ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:[229] and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... admits of keeping the right medium between the dignified, almost prancing hexameter, and the shorter metres of the lyrics. Its feet are nimble and fleet, but yet full of vigor and expressiveness. In addition, the Kalevala uses alliteration, and thus varies the rhythm of time with the rhythm of sound. This metre is especially ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... like Pallas Athenae. Wasn't she the lady that sprang full-fledged from the brain of Zeus? Well, I've a notion that Splinter yelled in Greek when he was a baby. That is, if he ever was an infant, and called for his bottle in dactylic hexameter. Oh, I know lots about Greek, pop," laughed Will as his father smiled. "I know the alphabet and a whole lot of things even if Splinter ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson

... viz., that in the second century B.C. the Muses from Parnassus aided the combined Greek armies against the destructive invasion of the Gauls by provoking a panic among the latter. I actually began my heroic poem in hexameter verse, but could not get ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... Gringoire; "I shall break my neck. Your stool limps like one of Martial's distiches; it has one hexameter leg and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... metres, "versifying," as it was called in contradistinction to rhyming, was becoming fast the fashion among the more learned. Stonyhurst and others had tried their hands at hexameter translations from the Latin and Greek epics, which seem to have been doggerel enough; and ever and anon some youthful wit broke out in iambics, sapphics, elegiacs, and what not, to the great detriment of the queen's English ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... Alexandrian line consists of twelve syllables (iambic hexameter). Neither the acrostic nor the Alexandrine has the property assigned to it here. A palindrame reads the same forward as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... we will put on the Vicar's simplicity, and cheerful familiarity with his own flesh and blood—and thus we address our Moses, "Come, my boy, you are no hand at singing, so turn the Elegy another way: let us have a little Latin, for your music is Hexameter and Pentameter." Our Moses, "That's a hard task, sir, for one that cannot mount to Parnass Hill without his 'Gradus ad Parnassum.'" "Well, then get your Gradus, and put your foot in that first step of the ladder." Our Moses, waggishly—"I must mind my feet, sir, or they will be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... and through one of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... to be repeated in bronze. What is more strange, it has long been the object of a religious cult. The right foot, so mangled by poor Pietro, wears a fine brass shoe, in order to prevent its being kissed away. This almost makes one think of Goethe's hexameter: "Wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde." Still it must be remembered that excellent critics have found the whole work admirable. Gsell-Fels says: "It is his second Moses; in movement and physique one of the greatest masterpieces; as a Christ-ideal, the heroic conception ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... or Praecepta, containing moral maxims. (e) Hedyphagetica, 'On Gastronomy,' modelled on a hexameter poem by Archestratus (about B.C. 310). (f) Sota, so called from Sotades, after whom the Sotadean metre has been named. The book was probably of a lascivious nature. (g) Epigrams; the chief of which ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... a famous place of public resort and entertainment. On the wall are two old paintings of Faust's carousal and his ride out of the door on a cask. One is accompanied by the following inscription, being two lines (Hexameter and ...
— Faust • Goethe

... yourself, John?" I asked, thanklessly quoting from the familiar hexameter, and lighting my ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... I have "tried my hand" on a new hexameter verse. With what success, I leave to those who are better able to judge than I. If I have failed, I have but added another failure to the numerous attempts to naturalize hexameter verse in ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... "The Hexameter consists of six feet, or twelve times. These feet, in the Latin and Greek languages, were always either dactyls, or spondees; the time of a dactyl, being only that of a spondee. In modern languages, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... byMr. Walter Crane, and first used by Messrs. Clark in 1881. It is used in several sizes. Of the very handsome Mark of Messrs. T. and A.Constable, the Queen's Printers, at the University Press, we may mention that the legend is a hexameter; it was written by Professor Strong, and contains two puns; the ship is an old Constable device. The Marks of both Messrs. Chatto and Windus (who succeeded to the business, started and carried on with such energy by the late John Camden Hotten) and Messrs. Macmillan and Co. (whose firm dates ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... list of biographers has sometimes been counted a poem in hexameter verse[68] the text of which was edited in 1882 by the ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... the Phoenix.—"SELEUCUS" (No. 13, p. 203.) asks, "Is there any published edition of the hexameter poem by Lactantius, which is said to have suggested the idea of the Anglo-Saxon Lay of the Phoenix?" This poem is not in hexameter, but in elegiac verse; and though, on account of its brevity, we could not expect that it would have been separately ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various

... it has happened that modern critics have detected a lack of patriotic interest in this most Roman of all Latin poets. Also may it here be remembered, that the single line which sums up all the history of Rome in one soul-shaking hexameter, is not Lucretian ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... containing six feet is called hexameter. This is the form adopted in the Iliad and the Odyssey of the Greeks, and the Aeneid of the Romans; it has been used sometimes by English writers in treating dignified subjects. "The Courtship of Miles Standish" and "Evangeline" are ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... Averni!" said the Duke, shaking his head. "Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis." No doubt, he thought, that as his son was at Oxford, admonitions in Latin would serve him better than in his native tongue. But Gerald, when he heard the grand hexameter rolled out in his father's grandest tone, entertained a comfortable feeling that the worst of the interview was over. "Win back what you had lost! Do you think that that is the common fortune of young gamblers when they fall among those who are ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... these strange monsters of his creation! Let us conclude our glance at this sad fall from harmony by quoting the excellent words of one who was a bitter opponent of Harvey in this as in other matters. 'The hexameter verse,' says Nash in his Fowre Letters Confuted, 1592, 'I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of ours hee cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... by the laws of prosody. Washington is a stately dactyl; Irving is a sweet and mellow spondee, and thus we have a combination which poets in ancient and modern days have sought with sedulous care, and which should close every line of hexameter verse. Hence a measure such, as that found in 'Washington Irving' terminates every line in Evangeline, or the works ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... Heritage heredo. Hermit ermito. Hernia hernio. Hero heroo. Heroic heroa. Heroine heroino. Heroism heroeco. Heron ardeo. Herring haringo. Hesitate sxanceligxi. Hesitation sxanceligxo. Hew dehaki. Hexagon sesangulo. Hexameter heksametro. Hiatus manko. Hiccough singulto. Hidden kasxita. Hide kasxi. Hide (skin) hauxto. Hideous malbelega. Hiding-place kasxejo. Hierarchy hierarhxio. Hieroglyphic hieroglifo. High alta. Highlander montano. Highness (title) mosxto. High-tide ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... the Iliad, or of parts of it, the metres which have been selected have been almost as various: the ordinary couplet in rhyme, the Spenserian stanza, the Trochaic or Ballad metre, all have had their partisans, even to that "pestilent heresy" of the so-called English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be pressed into the service by a violation of every rule of prosody; and of which, notwithstanding my respect for the eminent men who have attempted to naturalize it, I could never read ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... who refuse to follow the better life, a promise of salvation to those who repent. About the year 80 C.E., a book of this kind was composed. It is what is known as the Fourth Book of the Sibylline Oracles. The language is Greek, the form hexameter verse. In this poem, the Sibyl, in the guise of a prophetess, tells of the doom of those who resist the will of the one true God, praises the God of Israel, and holds out a beautiful prospect to ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... suggests celerity (this being the principle of the Alexandrine:)—inconsistency, in that Pope himself uses the same contrivance to convey the contrary idea of slowness. But why in English? It is not and cannot be disputed that, in the Hexameter verse of the Greeks and Latins—which is the model in this matter—what is distinguished as the 'dactylic line' was uniformly applied to express velocity. How was it to do so? Simply from the fact of being pronounced in an equal time with, while containing a greater number of syllables ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... hexameter verses inscribed on them, composed by monks, which are called Leonine verses, from one Leoninus, a monk of Marseilles, who lived in the early part of the twelfth century. A few examples of these ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... get into a funny state, when nothing is too hard for me, and that was how it was yesterday evening. Generally, I feel as dull as a post," said Norman, yawning and stretching; "I could not make a nonsense hexameter this minute, if I was to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... I put the moon into my verses, in all probability it was to rhyme to noon. 'The night was at her noon'—is a capital ending for the first hexameter—and the moon is booked for the next ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... h['o]nor['i]ficabilit['u]dinit['a]tibus. Thus there ought not to be much difficulty in saying C['o]nstant['i]nop['o]lit['a]ni, whether you keep the long antepenultima or shorten it after the English way; but he who forced the reluctant word to end an hexameter must have had 'Constantin['o]ple' in his mind, and therefore said Const['a]ntin['o]polit['a]ni with two false stresses. The result was an illicit lengthening of the second o. His other false quantity, the shortening ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... hexameter, farewell! In that moment the poet died in Thomas; I mean, the poet who had to dig his expressions of life out of ink-pots. Things boil up quickly and unexpectedly in the soul; century-old impulses, undreamed ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have wrought out of the Grecian heaven. 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 ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell



Words linked to "Hexameter" :   verse line



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