On Quantitative Metre 357and is not, and its absence prevents them from being quite ef-
fective. It is the rhythm that in spite of its soundness is not
altogether alive, does not keep sufficiently alert, has not found
the true movement that would give it the full power and speed of
the true hexameter. A second fault is that while individual lines
are good and may sound even excellent when read by themselves
or even two or three at a time, there is no rhythmic harmony
of the long passage or paragraph; one has, in the mass, the
sense of listening to the same indifferent and undistinguished
movement repeated without sufficient meaningful variation and
without any harmonious total significance. Above all the large
hexameter rhythm, such as we have it in Greek or Latin, has not
been found, nor anything that would equal it as a native English
harmony fitted for great poetic speech, for great thoughts and
feelings, for great action and movement. There is a tameness of
sound, a flatness of level, or, even when beauty or energy is there,
it is a tenuous beauty, a strength that is content to be low-toned
and moderate.
One reason of this deficiency must be that in all this work
the hexameter is compelled to express subjects whose triviality
brings it down far below its natural pitch of greatness, force
or beauty. A pathetically sentimental love story, a rather dull-
hued tale of courtship among New England Puritans, the trifling
doings and amours and chaff and chat of holiday-making un-
dergraduates, these are not subjects in which either language or
rhythm can rise to any great heights or reach out into revealing
largenesses; they are obliged to key themselves to commonness
and flatness; the language is as often as not confidentially famil-
iar or prosaic, a manner good enough for some other kinds of
verse but not entitled to call in the power of the great classical
metre. There can be in such an atmosphere no room and no
courage to dare to rise into any uplifting grandeur or break
out into any extreme of beauty. Both Clough and Longfel-
low tell their stories well and it is more for the interest of
the contents than for the beauty of the poetry that we read
them. But the hexameter was made for nobler purposes; it has
been the medium of epic or pastoral or it tuned itself to a