“Wept when you saw they were given the lad, and had you not managed.” “Let not the frozen air harm you.” “Scatter the sand with his hind hoofs.” “The pliant growth of the osier.” “Worthy of Sophocles’ sock, trumpet-tongued through the Universe echo.” “Own’d it himself, and yet he would not deliver it to me.” A very nice ear, too, is required to adjust the collocation of words in which either vowels or consonants predominate, and the relative position of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, the predominance of the former in our language increasing enormously the difficulty. No measure, moreover, so easily runs into intolerable monotony--a monotony which Clough sought to avoid by overweighting his verses with spondees, and which Longfellow illustrates by the cloying predominance of the dactylic movement. Sir Osborne Morgan tells us that he took Kingsley as his model. Kingsley’s hexameters are respectable, but they have no distinction, and he had certainly not a good ear. Longfellow’s are far better, and are sometimes exquisitely felicitous, as in a couplet like the following, which, with the exception of one word, is flawless:-- “Men whose lives glided on like the rivers that water the woodlands, Darken’d by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of Heaven.” Probably the best hexameters which have been composed in English are those in William Watson’s _Hymn to the Sea_ and those in which Hawtry translated Iliad III. 234-244, and the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, models--these versions--not merely of translation, but of hexametrical structure. There are, however, certain magical effects, particularly in the Virgilian hexameter, produced by an exquisite but audacious tact in the employment of licences, which can never be reproduced in English. Such would be-- “Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe. Illum etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricæ; Pinifer illum etiam solâ sub rupe jacentem Mænalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi.” Milton, and Milton alone among Englishmen, had the secret of this music, but he elicited it from another instrument. THE LATEST EDITION OF THOMSON[46] [Footnote 46: _The Poetical Works of James Thomson._ A New Edition, with Memoir and Critical Appendices, by the Rev. D. C. Tovey. 2 vols. London.]