It is also remarkable as introducing the dactylic hexameter of the ancients, ever since popular in America.
The Hexameter line consists of, practically, five dactyls and a spondee or trochee.
The Pentameter is never used alone, but, with a Hexameter preceding it in the distich, forms Elegiac Verse.
The ten-syllabled line is the heroic one of the English language, and a noble one it is, rivalling the lofty hexameter of Greece and Rome, and casting utterly into the shade the dancing, frivolous epic measure of French poetry.
When we first discover the epos, hexameter verse has already been selected for its vehicle.
Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place of the old Saturnian metre.
In the hexameter rises the fountain's watery column, In the pentameter sweet falling in melody down.
Wordsworth's competence to treat questions of quantity may be judged from the fact that in a hexameter verse he makes the first syllable of caro (carnis) long: p.
Moses also composed a song unto God, containing his praises, and a thanksgiving for his kindness, in hexameter verse.
What that hexameter verse, in which Moses's triumphant song is here said to be written, distinctly means, our present ignorance of the old Hebrew metre or measure will not let us determine.
A Monk of St. Albans made this Hexameter allusively to his Name: Dictus erat Nequam, vitam duxit tamen aquam.
The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative.
Yet he chose the vehicle of hexameter verse, and trammelled his genius with limitations which Empedocles, four hundred years before, must have found almost intolerable.
When physics and metaphysics were scarcely distinguished from mythology, it was natural to address the Muses at the outset of a treatise of ontology, and to cadence a theory of elemental substances in hexameter verse.
Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all between Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer's or Virgil's line?
In the Hexameter rises the fountain's silvery current, In the Pentameter aye falling in melody down.
It is written in hexameter verse, and in rhythm, thought, and feeling resembles some of the golden fragments from the Epithalamia of Sappho.
They were written in hexameter verse partly because that was the most familiar vehicle of expression in the first half of the fifth century B.
In the sixteenth century Puttenham quotes four-foot dactylics, and in his time the dactylic hexameter had already been imitated in English.
The hexameter is a six-foot catalectic verse theoretically consisting of five successive dactyls and a trochee.
Some recent attempts to imitate the hexameter in English according to the principles of quantity have been altogether unsuccessful, as e.
About the same time, Coleridge used the hexameter in some of his minor poems, Hymn to the Earth, Mahomet, &c.
But it was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that the English hexameter came into somewhat more extensive use.
Other passages, however, prove the English hexameter to be as capable of harmony as the German if treated in this way; cf.
Among these the =Elegiac= verse of the ancients (hexameter alternating with pentameter) was attempted by Sidney in his Arcadia.
But the only successful method of adapting the hexameter to English use is that adopted by William Taylor, who followed the example of the Germans in observing only the accentual system and substituting the accentual trochee for the spondee.
The elegiac distich consists of the hexameter followed by the pentameter.
The artificial movements in the hexameter were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and, denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the genius of the native idiom.
His brilliantly emotional Cynthia, with its rich and unexampled employment of that alternation of hexameter and pentameter which had now come to be known as the elegiac measure, seems, however, to have settled the type of Latin elegy.
He chose to write in Latin, and composed hexameter epics which celebrated the military exploits of his patron.
He created the Latin hexameter verse in which he wrote a great epic portraying the history of Rome from the migration of Aeneas.
Lucretius made the Latin hexameter a fitting medium for the expression of sustained and lofty thought.
A constant problem for the Latin poets was the impossibility of using words with cretic patterns (a long syllable, followed by a short syllable, followed by another long syllable) in hexameter or elegiac verse.
Ovid wished to balance the hexameter with the pentameter, and used a standard epithet to fill out the metre.
The elegiac poets admitted a monosyllabic ending to the hexameter if it was preceded by another monosyllable closely linked to it in sense: see Platnauer 13.
A neat conception this of poetry; and the same writer denounces leonine rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of the Middle Ages, the elegiac; for he regards the hexameter and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse.
Septeno Augustas decimo praeeunte Kalendas" is the opening hexameterin his Epistle to his friend Ratramnus.
The hexameter also was a favourite measure, used, for instance, by Alanus of Lille in the Anticlaudianus, perhaps the noblest of mediaeval narrative or allegorical poems in Latin.
Another excellent composition in hexameter was the Alexandreis of Walter, born, like Alanus, apparently at Lille, but commonly called of Chatillon.
The hexameterhad sufficed for the needs of the epic.
The finest extant specimen of this sort is Bion's Lament for Adonis, which, however, was composed in the idyllic age, when the hexameter had been substituted for the richer and more splendid lyric metres.
Many poems of the Syracusan idyllists are valuable historically as adaptations of the hexameterto subjects essentially lyrical.
The epic hexameter and the elegy, on the other hand, retained an Ionian character to the last.
The hexameter was consecrated to epical narrative; the elegy was confined to songs of lament or meditation; the iambic assumed a satiric character.
Even Parmenides had committed his austere theories tohexameter verse.
The name Alexandrine is said to have been derived from an old French poem on Alexander the Great, written about the twelfth or thirteenth century, and composed entirely of hexameter verses.
Referring to the Spenserian stanza which is composed of nine lines, eight of which are iambic pentameters, and the ninth a hexameter or Alexandrine.
A saccharometer, for taking the density of worts and beer.
In classic poetry what is known as elegiac verse is composed of couplets consisting of alternate hexameterand pentameter lines.
He was the first to transplant the hexameter into Italy.
One may go through his later poems and find on the average a full hexameter line on every page.
And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits of Harvey-- Stout hart and sweet hart, yet stoutest hart to be stooped.
Harvey's taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced into our language, is admirably ridiculed.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "hexameter" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
