were derived, either from
the misunderstood poems of Pindar, from the language of the Bible or
of the enthusiastic mystics, or from the poetic half-prose of the
pastoral poet Salomon Gessner, they were, in any case, something new
and peculiar, and their nature has not been grasped in the least
degree by the French in their "vers libres," or at any rate only since
the half-Germanic Fleming Verhaeren. They received an interesting
development through Goethe and Heinrich Heine, while most of the other
poets who made use of them, even the greatest one, Novalis, often
deteriorated either into a regular, if rhymeless, versification, or
into a pathetic, formless prose.

Another method of procuring new metrical mediums of expression for the
new wealth of emotions was to borrow. Klopstock naturalized antique
metres, or rather made them familiar to the school and to cultivated
poets, while on the other hand Heine's derision of August von Platen's
set form of verse was welcomed in many circles, and even the elevated
poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin, which approached the antique form,
remained foreign to the people, like the experiments of Leconte de
Lisle in France; in Italy it fared otherwise with Carducci's _Odi
barbare_. Only one antique metre became German, in the same sense that
Shakespeare had become a German poet; this was the hexameter, alone or
in connection with the pentameter; for the ratio of its parts to one
another, on which everything depends in higher metrics, corresponded,
to some extent, to that of the German couplets. For the same reason
the sonnet--not, however, without a long and really bitter fight--was
able to win a secure place in German reflective lyric poetry; indeed
it had already been once temporarily in our possession during the
seventeenth century. Thus two important metres had been added to
German poetry's treasure house of forms: first, the hexameter for a
continuous narrative of a somewhat epic character, even though without
high solemnity--which Goethe alone once aspired to in his
_Achilleis_--and also for shorter epigrammatic or didactic
observations in the finished manner of the distich; second, the sonnet
for short mood-pictures and meditations. The era of the German
hexameter seems, however, to be over at present, while, on the
contrary, the sonnet, brought to still higher perfection by Platen,
Moritz von Strachwitz and Paul Heyse, still exercises its old power of
attraction, especially over poe