bition was the downfall o' old Cole's dog. There, sonny, the bo't ain't nowheres in sight, for all your fidgetin'!" They both smiled broadly at the humorous warning, and as the old wagon rattled away Elisha stood a moment looking after it; then he went down to the wharf by winding ways among piles of decayed timber and disused lobsterpots. A small group of travelers and spectators had already assembled, and they stared at him in a way that made him feel separated from his kind, though some of them had come to see him off. One unenlightened acquaintance inquired if Elisha were expecting friends by that morning's boat; and when he explained that he was going away himself, asked kindly whether it was to be as far as Bath. Elisha mentioned the word "Boston" with scorn and compassion, but he did not feel like discussing his brilliant prospects now, as he had been more than ready to do the week before. Just then a deaf old woman asked for the time of day. She sat next him on the battered bench.

"Be you going up to Bath, dear?" she demanded suddenly; and he said yes. "Guess I'll stick to you, then, fur's you go; 't is kind o' blind in them big places." And Elisha faintly nodded a meek but grudging assent; then, after a few moments, he boldly rose, tall umbrella in hand, and joined the talkative company of young and old men at the other side of the wharf. They proceed ed to make very light of a person's going to Boston to enter upon his business career; but, after all, their thoughts were those of mingled respect and envy. Most of them had seen Boston, but no one save Elisha was going there that day to stay for a whole year. It made him feel like a city man.

The steamer whistled loud and hoarse before she came in sight, but presently the gay flags showed close by above the

pointed spruces.

Then she came jar

ring against the wharf, and the instant bustle and hurry, the strange faces of the passengers, and the loud rattle of freight going on board were as confusing and exciting as if a small piece of Boston itself had been dropped into that quiet cove.

The people on the wharf shouted cheerful good-bys, to which the young traveler responded; then he seated himself well astern to enjoy the views, and felt as if he had made a thousand journeys. He bought a newspaper, and began to read it with much pride and a beating heart. The little old woman came and sat next him, and talked straight on whether he listened or not, until he was afraid of what the other passengers might think; but nobody looked that way, and he could not find anything in the paper that he cared to read. Alone, but unfettered and aflame with courage; to himself he was not the boy who went away, but the proud man who one day would be coming home.

"Goin' to Boston, be ye?" asked the old lady for the third time; and it was still a pleasure to say yes, when the boat swung round, and there, far away on its gray and green pasture slope, with the dark evergreens standing back, were the low gray house, the little square barn, and the lines of fence that shut in his home. He strained his eyes to see if any one were watching from the door. He had almost forgotten that they could see him still. He sprang to the boat's side: yes, his mother remembered; there was something white waving from the doorway. The whole landscape faded from his eyes except that far-away gray house; his heart leaped back with love and longing; he gazed and gazed, until a height of green forest came between and shut the picture out. Then the country boy went on alone to make his way in the wide world.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

IN the July number of this magazine Mr. Lawton published a paper on Nausicaa, which contained some brilliant examples of the ease and power with which hexameters may be employed for the interpretation of Homer. Tennyson, Arnold, Dr. Hawtrey, have given us brief hexameter passages of superior subtlety; but it is doubtful if we have seen an employment of this antique metre which exhibits more completely, on any large scale, its average efficiency in doing the hard work of Homer. From the very fact, however, that Mr. Lawton has so well shown the capacities of the hexameter, its incapacities for the translation of Homer become newly apparent. Fine a scholar of both Greek and English as Mr. Lawton is, he has not been able to relieve his renderings of an air of management and ingenuity more suggestive of the literary monument than of the actual occurrence. His lines do not read themselves. The reader, who should be thinking of Nausicaa and the ball dance, must engineer the metre, and give at least half his attention to placing his stresses correctly. Reality, compulsion of belief, absence of literary tang, adaptation to the general man, removal of attention from the medium employed, enchainment to the scene, that union of vividness with simplicity which stamps the pleasures of the years preceding rather than following our early teens, these are qualities fundamental in Homer. They have not yet appeared in English hexameter translation. Mr. Lawton's experiment increases our doubt whether they ever will. A great poet, like Arthur Clough, can do much in this direction; yet Clough used his strange verse for a serio-comic purpose, and then did not succeed in getting himself widely read. In the hands of a less virile workman, like Longfellow, the metre

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becomes too slipshod for permanent charm. The cause of these hexametrical difficulties a single sentence can state. The prevalent movement of English speech is iambic, - that is, a stress is thrown on nearly every second syllable; the movement of the hexameter is largely dactylic, that is, the stress falls on nearly every third. It may be true that in the ancient hexameter nothing like this English stress occurred, and it certainly is true that by devices both of the tendencies here mentioned are frequently headed off. But the fact remains that the hexameter as we must write it to-day is ill suited to Homer, not merely because it is an unusual metre, but because it calls for that which the English language. at least the Saxon half of it does not most naturally supply, an abundance of dactylic words. Our native words, even when they have as many as three syllables, tend to accent the alternate ones. A tendency to alternate accent is deep in the temper of the language; so deep that to thwart it in any long-continued way is to work at half power, and to omit those elements of our tongue which are most important for the purpose in hand. For it happens that it is precisely Saxon English, with its dominant iambic beat, which we must chiefly draw upon to equip an English Homer. His sharp-edged pictures, those utterances of his in which sight rather than thinking dictates the expression, will not come out in Latin diction. Whenever we English speakers say anything we really believe, we instinctively drop into Saxon; and Homer we always believe. He is a truth-teller who does not hunt for modes of speech, as Latinizers do. He is a thing-poet, not a word-poet, a master of incuriosa felicitas; and any measure which sets us far to seek in finding him appropriate

words will distort him more than it will represent.

In one respect, however, I believe the hexametricians are on the right track. They seem to me to be feeling after a rhythmic effect which shall as little as possible be cut up into recognizable verse lengths. They want the allurement of poetry, but they want also the breadth and expansion which only prose can give. In the hexameter something of this compound power is suggested. In three respects its structure approaches prose. As blank or unrhymed verse, each line has no predetermined place in a stanza scheme; instead, and as in prose, one line may be written or a thousand, nothing but the matter to be expressed fixing the number. Then the hexameter has an exceptionally long flight, half as long again as its nearest of kin the English ten-syllabled heroic. The choppy effect of verse is thus les sened. Strength is imparted by elongating in the direction of prose. Lastly, the variations permissible in the dominant foot and in the pauses are larger than in any of the more familiar English measures. These permissible variations are, however, treacherous. If we stick to dactyls, we produce a kind of feeble canter; if we diversify much with spondees, feet of two weighty syllables instead of three tripping ones, in danger of puzzling our reader and rendering our verses hard to scan. But many as are the structural pitfalls which the hexameter contains for the writer, to the reader there is usually an appearance of arger license than ordinary poetry conveys. The sensuous effect, with all its palpitating rhythm, seems less rigidly metrical than the measures to which the ear is commonly tuned. To whatever the effect may be due, whether to the three considerations just pointed out or to others more elusive still, I cannot think there is a question that the hexameter strikes us all as a species of prose which has advanced a

we are

good way into the country of verse, or as verse temporarily sojourning in the regions of prose.

Perhaps it is partly this fact, that the English hexameter is a kind of tertium quid between verse and prose, which has so often enticed translators to try its difficult measure in the rendering of Homer. Squeezed into ordinary verse, a large part of Homer vanishes; for his so-called poems are straightforward narratives, broad and wide, with nothing lyrical about them. Alternations, antitheses, climaxes of feeling, rarely occur. The current runs even, calm, and clear. As the subject discussed is facts and events, not feelings, considerable space is usually needed for a single effect. This continuity, this actuality, this concernment with the men and things of every day, this emphasis of observation and of intellectual rather than emotional matters, leans toward prose. Verse establishes relations which are not wanted. It disjoints. It calls attention to portions of the poem too minute. Worst of all, it transports us from a real world into one of art and caprice. All this is hopelessly at issue with the large objective veracity of Homer. On the other hand, there is in Homer's work a diffused and ever-present joy which does not belong to prose. He does not write as a chronicler or man of business, but as a taster of beauty, a man of pleasure. His repetitions, rhymes, as one may say, in the thought, the coherence and steady elevation of his feeling, his plastic power and his delight in exercising it, all belong to verse. For rendering him fitly a medium is needed possessing the resources of both verse and prose.

Now, as has been said, the hexameter promises something of dual character. But it keeps its promise poorly. The difficulty just pointed out, of fitting our native Saxon iambics to its dactylic rhythm, narrows the means at the command of the translator, and is apt to render him artificial. But there are

precious hints in the hexameter which have been insufficiently heeded. Though hampered by its foreign foot, it strongly suggests the gain that might come by compromise, the fresh power that might be obtained by lightly crossing the bounds which ordinarily separate verse from prose. For the question at once arises if we need restrict ourselves to crossing the bounds in this particular fashion. Dactylic rhythms are not obligatory. Why not employ iambic? May we not abandon rhyme and stanza, just as the hexameter abandons them; with it employ a structure capable of the longest or the shortest flights; then, in order to cast our phrases solid, make use of its large flexibility in pauses and even in the prevalent foot; and still retain the rhythmic beat, a beat different, however, from that of the hexameter in being akin instead of alien to the genius of our language? When we have done all this, we arrive at an iambic recitative, or free unmetred rhythm, whose cadences wait upon the pauses of the thought rather than upon those of any prearranged system.

Half a dozen years ago I published the first twelve books of the Odyssey, rendered in a rhythmic prose of this sort. Undertaking a novel thing, my work showed, I believe, a good many marks of the 'prentice hand. There were hitches as one read. One could not altogether withdraw attention from the method and be carried forward by the matter. In a line of verse, when a group of monosyllables falls together, the eye guides the ear to the intended rhythmic effect. In Tennyson's lines, "Her manners had not that repose

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere," every reader rightly accents "had," and leaves "not" alone. When the semblance of a line is removed, the demand becomes more rigid and more difficult to fulfill, that the rhythmic accent and the thought accent shall instinctively coincide. With all the diversities which

thought assumes in different minds, this coincidence is hard to insure. If by any oversight the reader has not been shut up to a single mode of approach, rhythmic roughnesses arise. Whether this difficulty can be altogether avoided in a predominantly Saxon diction, I am not clear. The aim, at any rate, should be to make the factor of rhythm entirely forgotten by the reader; but through its overlooked influence to lend magic to the simple thought, to knit its structure, to justify its poetic peculiarities to the feeling, and so to explain why for twenty-five hundred years Homer has been a passion and an ennoblement among men of every station.

A specimen of a recent experiment of mine in rhythmic prose I here subjoin. It is the twenty-third book of the Odyssey, the one entitled The Recognition of Odysseus by Penelope. After a twenty years' absence Odysseus has returned from the war, and finds at his palace more than a hundred young nobles from Ithaca and the neighboring islands, who, under pretense of wooing the widowed queen, are living at free quarters there; devouring the wine and cattle of Odysseus, corrupting his serving-women, and disregarding the rights of Penelope and the young Telemachus. In the disguise of a beggar, Odysseus carefully acquaints himself with the situation at the palace before making himself known. To Telemachus first, and subsequently to his faithful swineherd Eumæus and the neatherd Philætius, he discloses himself, and receives from them promises of secrecy and of aid. His old nurse Eurycleia has discovered him by means of a hunting-scar. Aware how impossible it would be for Penelope to know him and to hide the glad knowledge, Athene has kept her from the discovery, but has prompted her to bring her weary years of waiting to an end. To stop the waste of her son's goods, she has offered to give herself to him among the suitors who can bend Odysseus' bow and send