monks of old, in their least favourable point of view, that one could ill spare these portions of the poem.
As perpetual change is the cue in the movement of the "Golden Legend,"—the scene shifting from princely castle to peasant's homestead, from village church to stately cathedral. from miracle-play to pilgrimage, from convent-cellar (capitally done, too) to scriptorium, from cloisters to chapel, from monkish refectory to sacred nunnery, from the Covered Bridge at Lucerne (its walls grimly emblazoned with the Dance of Death) to the St. Gothard Pass, from an inn at Genoa to a light felucca at sea, from the School of Salerno to the last scene of all that ends this strange if not eventful history,—so perpetual variety of metre, to suit all moods, and chime in with all vicissitudes, has been adventurously attempted. Professor Longfellow has evidently paid great attention to the study of metrical laws, and is endowed with a quick ear for the capabilities of rhythm. But he is too fond of experimentalising, and of trying to turn unwieldy forms into plastic graces; nor can we discover that
his musical finesse is such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch,
as to justify, by the stamp of success, his hazardous essays in metrical novelty. The dialogue of the pilgrim pair on the road to Hirschau[1] is almost literally, "no end of" a measure, and one in which it is superlatively easy for poet and patient to lose their way. The adoption of such an elongated inelegance—a sort of wounded (sea) snake "floating many a rood"—a most needless Alexandrine run to seed—a mile and a bittock—a lane without a turning—implies the professor's persuasion of his aptness to cope with greater difficulties than the hexameter, and his dissent from the common cry of critics which pronounced the use of that metre all but fatal to "Evangeline." "Evangeline" is so fair and good that it would require something more deadly than hexameters[2] to be fatal to her beaming vitality. We love her for the dangers she has passed, amid these perilous breakers, as well as others not to be scanned and measured. It is asserted, indeed, that this calumniated metre is, after all, highly relished by persons of good ear and unprejudiced taste—such as most women who are lovers of poetry, and who have not to contend against traditions from the Latin
- ↑ Hexameters are apt to take an English reader's breath away; but who shall find wind for octameters, in which this dialogue is cast? As thus:Six beats plus a bonus of two, make up a beating hard to bear.
Onward and onward the highway runs to the distant city, impatiently bearing
Tidings of human joy and disaster, of love and of hate, of doing and daring. - ↑ "We not long since," says a writer in the Prospective Review (No. xxxiv.), "put to the test the most successful English hexameters which have lately been written—those, namely. In Longfellow's 'Evangeline.' If read with regard to sense, the ear could catch no metre. If read with express view to metre, it was difficult to apprehend the sense." He holds that as we know nothing of the Latin accent, and are therefore unable to realise to ourselves an hexameter, as it was to the Romans, so our imitation of it results in an awkward, scrambling, three-legged metre—"as like the sonorous rapidity of Homer's verse, or the stately majesty of Virgil's line, as a ploughboy striding over the furrows is like the graceful motion of the Tragic Muse." For the pro and con. English hexameters, thee reader may consult with profit the sensible and agreeable Dialogues in Fraser's Magazine. Also the letters of M. Philarète Chasles in the Athenæum, and a recent essay of ability in the North British Review.
