On Quantitative Metre 363writer to discover and sustain the true movement of the hex-
ameter, its spirit and character, such as we find it in the ancient
epics, pastorals, epistles, satires in which it was used with a
supreme greatness or a consummate mastery. That movement
can be of many kinds; it admits a considerable variation of
pace, sometimes swift, sometimes slow, short in its rapidity or
long-drawn-out with many rhythmic turns, and there are sev-
eral possibilities in each kind. Only a considerable poetic genius
could bring out the full power and subtleties of its rhythms; but
it is essential for even a tolerable success to find and keep up a
true length and pitch in the delivery of the lines; the dactylic flow
is especially exacting in this respect on the care of the rhythmist.
An undulant run is the easiest to maintain, the most simple and
natural pace, but it has to be varied by other movements, a long
or a brief bounding swiftness, the light rapid run or a slower
deliberate running; a large even stream is a second possibility as
a basic rhythm, but this needs a Virgilian genius or talent; the
surge is the greatest of all, but only the born epic poet could
sustain it for a long time, — it suits indeed only the epic or high-
pitched narrative, but it can come in from time to time as an
occasional high rise from a lower level of rhythmic plenitude.
Finally, rhyme can be used for poems of reflective thought or
lyrical feeling; but it must not be made the excuse for a melodic
monotone. That kind of melodic fixity is permissible in very
short dactylic pieces, but the hexameter does not move at ease
in a short range: it has fluted in the pastoral grove and walked
on the Appian way, but it loves better the free sky and the winds
of the ocean; it finds its natural self in the wide plain, on high
mountains or in the surge and roll of a long venturous voyage.
If the difficulty of the hexameter can be successfully over-
come, no insuperable impossibility need be met in the naturalisa-
tion of other classical metres, for the harmonic principle will be
the same. All that is necessary is that artificial quantity and the
atmosphere of a pastime or an experiment must be abandoned;
there must not be the sense of an importation or a construction,
the metre must read as if it were a born English rhythm, not a
naturalised alien. It would be a mistake to cling to rigid scholarly