"Hexameter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of lost Milesian tales, of a life growing into sculpture or breaking into sinuous hexameter waves. The one mystic, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... me whether or not an epic goes at a hexameter gallop through the ages, or whether it chooses to be a flood of muddy water, ripping out a channel from the mountains to the sea. It is merely a matter of how the great dynamic force shall ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... poetry, partly on the true method of translation, (especially 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 particularly worthy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... stanza, invented by 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
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... was the name assigned to the hexameter poem commencing, "Papa stupor mundi," inscribed, about the year 1200, to the reigning Pope, Innocent III., by Galfridus de Vino salvo. Of this work several manuscript copies are to be met with in England. I will refer only to two in the Bodleian, Laud. 850. 83.: Ken. Digb. 1665. 64. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... for this choice were based upon the legend related by Pausanias, 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 ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 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 Quinctius Flamininus, ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... though he bade 'spare the house of Pindarus,' we vehemently suspect, never read the works of Pindarus; that labour he left to some future Hercules. So much for his subjects: but a second objection is—his metre: The hexameter, or heroic metre of the ancient Greeks, is delightful to our modern ears; so is the Iambic metre fortunately of the stage: but the Lyric metres generally, and those of Pindar without one exception, are as utterly without meaning to us, as merely chaotic ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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
... Iliad in hexameters, no man can tell; but having done so, he thereby constituted for ever the proper metre of Greek—and Latin—Epic poetry. But what a multitude of subjects, how different from one another does that, and every other Epic poem, comprehend! Glory to the hexameter! it suits them all. Now, in every Epic poem, and in few more than in the Iliad, there are many dramatic scenes. But in the Greek tragic drama, the dialogue is mainly in iambics; for this reason, that iambics are naturally suited for the language of conversation. Be it so. Yet here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... of avatar of Lucan, dominates the fourth century with the terrible clarion of his verses: a poet forging a loud and sonorous hexameter, striking the epithet with a sharp blow amid sheaves of sparks, achieving a certain grandeur which fills his work with a powerful breath. In the Occidental Empire tottering more and more in the perpetual menace of the Barbarians now pressing in hordes at the Empire's yielding gates, he revives antiquity, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... early writings of this kind have perished; and 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 ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... verses 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
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... 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
... fine picture into blank verse so well, as to convince the public, that the beauties of 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 scenery of Theocritus than the empyreal ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... 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 are ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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
... 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; 'the son of Crispin vows and protests there's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Hall," fifteen syllables, divided by a pause, into groups of four trochees, and of three and a half—the last syllable forming the rhyme. It is admirably suited to the sustained and incisive manner in which the argument is carried on. "Ixion" in "Jocoseria," is in alternate hexameter and pentameter, which the author also employs here for the only time; it imitates the turning of the wheel on which Ixion is bound. "Pheidippides" is in a measure of Mr. Browning's own, composed of dactyls and spondees, each line ending with a half ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... abuse as the law of the measure. Horace is scarcely less remarkable for his terseness than for his ease: the tendency of the octosyllabic metre in its colloquial form is to become slipshod, interminable, in a word unclassical. Again, few of those who use it apply it consistently to all Horace's hexameter poems: most make a distinction, applying it to some and not to others. In point of fact, however, it does not seem that any such distinction can be made. Horace's lightest Satires or Epistles have generally something grave about them: his gravest have more than one light passage. To draw a ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... charm is tolerably identical with that of the original. In more martial and stirring passages the failure is more signal, and here especially we feel that if Pope's rhyming couplets are sorry equivalents for the Homeric hexameter, blank verse is superior to them only in a negative way. The real equivalent, if any, is the romance metre of Scott, parts of whose poems, notably the last canto of Marmion and some passages in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, are about the most Homeric things ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... poem 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 greatness might have been foretold ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... least, to the Rev. E. D. Neill, whose admirable "History of Minnesota" so fully and faithfully presents almost all that is known of the history, traditions, customs, manners and superstitions of the Dakotas. In Winona I have "tried my hand" on 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 vain attempts to naturalize Hexameter verse in the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... church Latin in its prime of literary refinement, and its accent is so obvious and its rhythm so musical that even one ignorant of the language could pronounce it, and catch its rhymes. The "Contemptu Mundi" begins with these two lines, in a hexameter impossible to ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... best hexameter spectacles he surveyed the dark-eyed daughter of the Nile who was telling his fortune with a strong Irish accent; all went smoothly until the prophetess happened to see the Professor's sunburnt nose, fiery red ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... this world, and good men have been afflicted;" and it is the most probably, because from the beginning, to the third verse of the third chapter, where the complaint of Job beginneth, the Hebrew is (as St. Jerome testifies) in prose; and from thence to the sixt verse of the last chapter in Hexameter Verses; and the rest of that chapter again in prose. So that the dispute is all in verse; and the prose is added, but as a Preface in the beginning, and an Epilogue in the end. But Verse is no usuall stile of such, as either are themselves in great pain, as Job; or of such as come to comfort ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... that the Hazaj is not in use as a hexameter, but only with an 'Aruz majzuah or shortened by one foot. Hence it is only in the second 'Aruz of the Wafir, which is likewise majzuah, that the ambiguity as to the real nature of the metre can arise;[FN457] and the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of the soul, on the existence of God or future 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, and generally had but little taste for it, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... diversions which his age and looks 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 with ancient marbles, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... [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 of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... him, I thought it a very sonorous hexameter. I did not tell him, it was not in the Virgilian style[800]. He much regretted that his first tutor[801] 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 missed his lecture ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... some people think that it is the iambic rhythm, because that is the most like a speech, on which account it happens that it is most frequently employed in fables, because of its resemblance to reality—because the dactylic hexameter rhythm is better suited to a lofty and magniloquent subject But Ephorus himself, an inconsiderable orator, though coming from an excellent school, inclines to the paeon, or dactyl, but avoids the spondee and trochee. For because the paeon has three short syllables and the dactyl two, ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... verse, 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 ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... 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 nearest ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... 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 more ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... literary impulse and material. Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator of characters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an artist is manifested by his successful domestication in Evangeline of the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with effect. The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived for a time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in the use of hexameter in his Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, so that we have now ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an afterthought with Harvey, for, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... or priestess, seated upon a tripod placed over the orifice. As she became overpowered by the influence of the prophetic exhalations, she uttered the message of the god. These mutterings of the Pythia were taken down by attendant priests, interpreted, and written in hexameter verse. Sometimes the will of Zeus was communicated to the pious seeker by dreams and visions granted to him while sleeping in the temple ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the wave of the sea, upheaving in long undulations, Plunges loud on the sands, pauses, and turns, and retreats, So the Hexameter, rising and singing, with cadence sonorous, Falls; and in refluent rhythm back the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 Pentameter) ...
— Faust • Goethe
... of the average six to seven words contained in the Virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in Virgil's works or other Latin authors, would DALY have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. Nor would he have had to frequent ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... 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 (the duumviri ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... 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 ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... final s in scanning is extremely frequent. Cf. such a line as this hexameter from Ennius, where the s is suppressed ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... discant 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
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... they could be kept at all) as at Stonehenge. En passant—this tossing was a pastime replete with the sublime and awful. That their efforts might be simultaneous, those who held the blanket, and they were legion, made use of the following neat hexameter: ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... that spicy paper a pensive little poem called "The Rooster's Cry": one, in Spenserian measure, rebuking me for alluding lightly to serious subjects,—a thing I never do, I am sure, and I can't imagine what "J. H. P." meant; and another, in hexameter, calling upon me to "arouse," and "smile," and "struggle on," and, in short, to stop crying and behave myself,—only it was said in figures. I'm much obliged to "Quintius" for the advice; but I should like to explain, that I am subject to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... metrical law, but to their antiquity; and (2) the term Saturnius was also applied to a definite measure on the principles of Greek prosody, though rudely and loosely moulded—the measure employed by Naevius, which soon became antiquated, when Ennius introduced the hexameter—and which is the metrum Saturnium recognised by the grammarians." [21] Whether this measure was of Italian origin, as Niebuhr and Macaulay think, or was introduced from Greece at an early period, it never attained to anything ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the poet of Parliament; for Mr. Gladstone, who, more than any other, has kept alive in Parliament the scholarly traditions of the past, has never been very Horatian, preferring, whenever the dignity of the occasion seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of the hexameter, something out of Virgil or Lucretius. The new generation of honourable members might not unprofitably turn their attention to Pope. Think how, at all events, the labour members would applaud, not with 'a sad civility,' but with downright cheers, a ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... complete form his military memoirs only. His 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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 ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... my youth I have mounted, as others have mounted, Galloping Hexameter, Pentameter cantering after, English by dam and by sire; bit, bridle, and saddlery, English; English the girths and the shoes; all English from snaffle to crupper; Everything English around, excepting the tune of the jockey? Latin and Greek, it is true, I have often attach'd to my phaeton ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... same volume W. W. T. (quoting from D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature a passage which supplies the hexameter completing the distich, and attributes the verses to Sidonius Apollinaris) asks where may be found a legend which represents the two lines to have formed part of a dialogue between the fiend, under the form of a mule, and a monk, who was his rider. B. H. C., at p. 521. of the same volume, sends ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 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 marvel at his serenity. Only when they saw him sit silent, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and sent to Paris, 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... 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 and her ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley |
