My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.
In Shakspeare we have _i’th’_ and _o’th’_ for monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as _Danai_, _victory_ three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre _lege solutum_; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with double force upon himself.
To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?— Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s— Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—
cannot be a _less_ detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate; and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself _feels_ what I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s works, for the phenomenon.
I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble trochees already quoted (from _Bétween_ to _Tó a_) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.