266. To William Wordsworth

Pub. Memoirs of Wordsworth, i. 138.

[Early December 1798]

As to the German Hexameters, they have in their very essence grievous defects. It is possible and probable that we receive organically very little pleasure from the Greek and Latin hexameters; for, most certainly, we read all the spondees as iambics or trochees. But then the words have a fixed quantity. We know it; and there is an effect produced in the brain similar to harmony without passing through the ear-hole. The same words, with different meanings, rhyming in Italian, is a close analogy. I suspect

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that great part of the pleasure derived from Virgil consists in this satisfaction of the judgment. 'Majestate manûs' begins an hexameter; and a very good beginning it is. 'Majestate magnâ' is read exactly in the same manner, yet that were a false quantity; and a schoolmaster would conceit that it offended his ear. Secondly, the words having fixed quantities in Latin, the lines are always of equal length in time; but in German, what is now a spondee is in the next line only two-thirds of a dactyl. Thirdly, women all dislike the hexameters with whom I have talked. They say, and in my opinion they say truly, that only the two last feet have any discernible melody; and when the liberty of two spondees, 'Jovis incrementum,' is used, it is absolute prose.  1

When I was ill and wakeful, I composed some English hexameters: 2

William, my teacher, my friend! dear William and dear Dorothea!
Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table;
Place it on table or desk; and your right hands loosely half-closing, 3
Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,
Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forkéd left hand,
Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of each finger;
Read with a nod of the head in a humouring recitativo;
And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before you.
This is a galloping measure; a hop, and a trot, and a gallop!

All my hexameters fly, like stags pursued by the stag-hounds,
Breathless and panting, and ready to drop, yet flying still onwards. 4
I would full fain pull in my hard-mouthed runaway hunter;
But our English Spondeans are clumsy yet impotent curb-reins;
And so to make him go slowly, no way have I left but to lame him.

William, my head and my heart! dear Poet that feelest and thinkest!
Dorothy, eager of soul, my most affectionate sister!
Many a mile, O! many a wearisome mile are ye distant,
Long, long, comfortless roads, with no one eye that doth know us.
O! it is all too far to send to you mockeries idle:
Yea, and I feel it not right! But O! my friends, my beloved!
Feverish and wakeful I lie, -- I am weary of feeling and thinking.
Every thought is worn down, -- I am weary, yet cannot be vacant.
Five long hours have I tossed, rheumatic heats, dry and flushing,
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1 	For Wordsworth's reply, see Early Letters, 203.
2 	Poem, i. 304.
3 	False metre. [Note by S. T. C.]
4 	'Still flying onwards', were perhaps better. [Note by S. T. C.]

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Gnawing behind in my head, and and throbbing about me,
Busy and tiresome, my friends, as the beat of the boding nightspider. 1

I forget the beginning of the line:

. . . my eyes are a burthen,
Now unwillingly closed, now open and aching with darkness.
O! what a life is the eye! what a fine and inscrutable essence!
Him that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him;
Him that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother;
Him that ne'er smiled at the bosom as babe that smiles in its slumber;
Even to him it exists, it stirs and moves in its prison;
Lives with a separate life, and 'Is it the spirit?' he murmurs:
Sure, it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only its language.

There was a great deal more, which I have forgotten, as I never wrote it down. No doubt, much better might be written; but these will still give you some idea of them. The last line which I wrote I remember, and write it for the truth of the sentiment, scarely less true in company than in pain and solitude:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea!
You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you!