an voice of England,
Milton a name to resound for ages.

Here the stresses which the meaning of the English verse demands fall
exclusively on syllables which would, according to Latin prosody, be
long; but there are one or two syllables which in Latin verse would be
long (such as "of" in the second line) which invite no stress in the
English--which do not, indeed, admit of it--and must for that reason be
treated by an English reader as short. Aiming at greater completeness,
but otherwise in a manner very much less ambitious, I attempted an
experiment of a similar kind myself, consisting of a few hexameters, in
which not only do the natural stresses fall, and fall exclusively, on
syllables which in Latin would be long, but in which also every syllable
would be emphasized by an English reciter with a natural stress
corresponding to it. These hexameters were a metrical amplification of
an advertisement which figures prominently in the carriages of the Tube
Railway, proclaiming the charms of a suburb called Sudbury Town, and
remarkable for its surrounding pine woods. The moment I read the words
"Sudbury Town" I recognized in them the beginning of a hexameter
classically pure; and after many abortive attempts I worked out a
sequel--a very short one--as follows:

Sudbury Town stands here. In an old-world region around it
Tall, dark pines, like spires, with above them a murmur of umbrage,
Guard for us all deep peace. Such peace may the weary suburbans
Know not in even a dream. These, these will an omnibus always,
Ev'n as they sink to a doze just earned by the toil of a daytime,
Rouse, or a horse-drawn dray, too huge to be borne by an Atlas,
Shakes all walls, all roofs, with a sound more loud than an earthquake.[5]

The moral of such experiments seems to me to be this: that even if
ancient prosody, such as that of the Virgilian hexameter, could be
naturalized completely in English, the emotional effect of the meter
would in the two languages be different, and that Anglo-Latin hexameters
would, with very rare exceptions, mean no more than successes in a
graceful and very difficult game. It is indeed for that very reason that
I mention this question here. It is a question of pure literature or of
purely literary form. As such, it has proved fascinating to many highly
cultivated persons; yet even by such persons themselves it will not be
seriously regarded as much better than trivial. But this i