Chapter XII: Part I: (Continued from last Number.) (3)

Hoole's _Orlando Furioso_, and _Jerusalem Delivered_, are among the world's duller achievements in the art of Translation. They have obtained some favour of public opinion by the interest which will break through them, and which they in their unambitious way singularly attest--the interest of the matter. What is the native deficiency which extinguishes in them every glimmer of the original Style? The clerk at the India-House, or some other house, had not, in the moulding of heart or brain, any touch of the romantic. And Ariosto and Tasso are the two poets of Romance. Take a translator of no higher intellectual endowment than Mr Hoole--perform some unknown adjuration to the goddess Nature, which shall move her to infuse into him the species of sensibility which grounds the two poems, and which we have said that we desiderate in the bold Accountant,--read the poems through with him, taking care that he understands them--as far as a matter of the sort may be seen to, teach him, which is all fair, a trick or two of our English verse to relieve the terrible couplet monotony--run an eye over the MS. on its way to the printer, and he shall have enriched the literature of his country with, if not two rightly representative, yet too justifiable Translations.

Dryden's defence of the manner in which Pindar has been made to speak English by Cowley, cannot be sustained. A translator must give the meaning of his author so as that they who are scholars in the vernacular only--for to the unread and uncultivated he does not address himself--may be as nearly as possible so impressed and affected as scholars in the original tongue are by the author; or, soaring a little more ambitiously, as nearly as may be as they were affected to whom the original work was native. To Anglicize Pindar is not the adventure. It is to Hellenize an English reader. Homer is not dyed in Grecism as Pindar is. The profound, universal, overpowering humanity of Homer makes him of the soil everywhere. The boundaries of nations, and of races, fade out and vanish. He and we are of the family--of the brotherhood--Man. That is all that we feel and know. The manners are a little gone by. That is all the difference. We read an ancestral chronicle, rather than the diary of to-day. But Pindar is all Greek--Greek to the backbone. There the stately and splendid mythology stands in its own power--not allied to us by infused human blood--but estranged from us in a dazling, divine glory. The great theological poet of Greece, the hymnist of her deities, remembers, in celebrating athlete and charioteer, his grave and superior function. To hear Pindar in English, you must open your wings, and away to the field of Elis, or the Isthmian strand. Under the canopying smoke of London or Edinburgh, even amongst the beautiful fields of England or Scotland, there is nothing to be made of him. You must be a Greek among Greeks.

Therefore, in the Translator, no condescension to our ignorance at least. And no ignoble dread of our ignorant prejudices. The difficult connexion of the thoughts which Dryden duly allows to the foreign and ancient poet, a commentary might clear, where it does as much for the reader of the Greek; or sometimes, possibly, a word interpolated might help. But the difficulty of translating Pindar is quite distinct from his obscurity. For it is his light. It is the super-terrestrial splendour of the lyrical phraseology which satisfied the Greek imagination, lifted into transport by the ardour, joy, and triumph, of those Panhellenic Games. It is the simple, yet dignified strength of the short, pithy, sage Sentences. It is the rendering of the now bold and abrupt, now enchained sequences of expressive sound, in those measures which we hardly yet know how to scan. It is not the track but the wing of the Theban eagle that is the desperation.

It is always delightful to hear Dryden speaking of Cowley. He was indeed a man made to be loved. But to students in the divine art, his poetry will for ever remain the great puzzle. His "Pindarque Odes, written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar," are unique. Cowley was a scholar. In Latin verse he is one of the greatest among the modern masters; and he had much Greek. There can be no doubt that he could construe Pindar--none that he could have understood him--had he tried to do so. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another." Instead, therefore, of translating him word for word, "the ingenious Cowley" set about imitating his style and manner, and that he thought might best be effected by changing his measures, and discarding almost all his words, except the proper names, to which he added many others of person or place, illustrious at the time, or in tradition. Events and exploits brought vividly back by Pindar to the memory of listeners, to whom a word sufficed, are descanted on by Cowley in explanatory strains, often unintelligible to all living men. The two opening lies of his first Imitation characterize his muse.

"Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words, and speaking things."

The words do dance indeed; and "Cowley's Medley" combines the Polka and the Gallopade.

Yet throughout these Two Odes (the Second Olympic and the First Nemaean) may be detected flowing the poetry of Pindar. Compare Cowley with him--book in hand--and ever and anon you behold Pindar. Cowley all along had him in his mind--but Cowley's mind played him queer tricks--his heart never; yet had he a soul capable of taking flight with the Theban eagle. There are many fine lines, sentimental and descriptive, in these extraordinary performances. There is sometimes "a golden ferment" on the page, which, for the moment, pleases more than the cold correctness of Carey. For example--THE ISLE OF THE BLEST.

"Far other lot befalls the good;
A life from trouble free;
Nor with laborious hands
To vex the stubborn lands,
Nor beat the billowy sea
For a scanty livelihood.
But with the honour'd of the gods,
Who love the faithful, their abodes;
By day or night the sun quits not their sphere,
Living a dateless age without a tear.
The others urge meanwhile,
Loathsome to light their endless toil.
But whoso thrice on either side
With firm endurance have been tried,
Keeping the soul exempted still
Through every change from taint of ill,
To the tower of Saturn they
Travel Jove's eternal way.
On that blest Isle's enchanted ground,
Airs from ocean breathe around;
Burn the bright immortal flowers,
Some on beds, and some on bowers,
From the branches hanging high;
Some fed by waters where they lie;
Of whose blossoms these do braid
Armlets, and crowns their brows to shade.
Such bliss is their's, assured by just decree
Of Rhadamanth, who doth the judgment share
With father Saturn, spouse of Rhea, she
Who hath o'er all in heav'n the highest chair.
With them are Peleus, Cadmus number'd,
And he, whom as in trance he slumber'd,
His mother Thetis wafted there,
Softening the heart of Jove with prayer,
Her own Achilles, that o'erthrew
Hector, gigantic column of old Troy,
And valiant Cycnus slew,
And Morning's AEthiop boy."

CAREY.

"Whilst in the lands of unexhausted light
O'er which the godlike sun's unwearied light,
Ne'er winks in clouds, nor sleeps in night,
An endless spring of age the good enjoy,
Where neither want does pinch, nor plenty cloy.
There neither earth nor sea they plow,
Nor ought to labour owe
For food, that whilst it nourishes does decay,
And in the lamp of life consumes away.
Thrice had these men through mortal bodies past,
Did thrice the tryal undergo,
Till all their little dross was purged at last,
The furnace had no more to do.
There in rich Saturn's peaceful state
Were they for sacred treasures placed--
The Muse-discovered world of Islands Fortunate.

Soft-footed winds with tuneful voyces there
Dance through the perfumed air.
There silver rivers through enamell'd meadows glide,
And golden trees enrich their side.
Th' illustrious leaves no dropping autumn fear,
And jewels for their fruit they bear,
Which by the blest are gathered
For bracelets to the arm, and garlands to the head.
Here all the heroes and their poets live,
Wise Radamanthus did the sentence give,
Who for his justice was thought fit
With sovereign Saturn on the bench to sit.
Peleus here, and Cadmus reign.
Here great Achilles, wrathful now no more,
Since his blest mother (who before
Had try'd it on his body in vain)
Dipt now his soul in Stygian lake,
Which did from thence a divine hardness take,
That does from passion and from vice invulnerable make."

Carey's commencement is dull--his close is good--but the whole will never, on this earth, be gotten by heart. Cowley's conceits are cruel in Pindar's case--yet, in spite of them, there is a strange sublimity in the strain--at the end moral grandeur. Reginald Heber and Abraham Moore--especially Reginald--excel Carey; but Pindar in English is reserved for another age.

Dryden dashed at every poet--Theocritus, Lucretius, Persius, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, Homer--each in his turn unhesitatingly doth he take into his translating hands. In his Essay on Satire, he compares with one another the three Roman Satirists; but though he draws their characters with his usual force and freedom of touch, they are not finely distinctive--if coloured _con amore_, yet without due consideration. In the Preface to the Second Miscellany, he says of Horace's Satires, that they "are incomparably beyond Juvenal's, if to laugh and rally is to be preferred to raillery and declaiming." In his Essay, he says, "In my particular opinion, Juvenal is the more delightful writer." And again--"Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit; he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home; his spleen is raised, and he raises mine. I have the pleasure of concernment in all he says; he drives his reader along with him. * * * His thoughts are sharper; his indignation against vice more vehement; his spirit has more of the commonwealth genius; he treats tyranny and all the vices attending it, as they deserve, with the utmost rigour; and consequently a noble soul is better pleased with a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty, than with _a temporizing poet, a well-manner'd court-slave, and a man who is often afraid of laughing in the right place, who is ever decent because he is naturally servile_." Is this Quintus Horatius Flaccus!

In Dryden and Juvenal are met peer and peer. Indignant scorn and moral disgust instigated the nervous hand of Juvenal, moulded to wield the scourge of satire. He is an orator in verse, speaking with power and command, skilled in the strength of the Roman speech, and practised in the weapons of rhetoric. But he is nevertheless a poet. Seized with impressions, you see his sail caught with driving gusts, if his eye be on the card. He snatches images right and left on his impetuous way, and flings them forth suddenly and vividly, so that they always tell. Perhaps he is more apt at binding a weighty thought in fewer words than his Translator, who felt himself as this disadvantage when he expressively portrayed the Latin as "a severe and compendious language." The Roman satirist has more care of himself; he maintains a prouder step; and the justifying incentive to this kind of poetry, hate with disdain of the vices and miseries to be lashed, more possesses his bosom. And what a wild insurrection of crimes and vices! What a challenge to hate and disdain in the minds in which the tradition of the antique virtues, the old _mores_, those edifiers of the sublime Republic, had yet life! Rome under Nero and Domitian! Pedants have presumed to question the sincerity of his indignation, and have more than hinted that his power of picturing those enormous profligacies was inspired by the pleasure of a depraved imagination. Never was there falser charge. The times and the topics were not for delicate handling,--they were to be looked at boldly in the face,--and if spoken of at all, at full, and with unmistakable words.

There is no gloating in his eyes when fixed in fire on guilt. Antipathy and abhorrence load with more revolting colours the hideous visage, from which, but for that moral purpose, they would recoil. But what, it may be asked, is the worth and use of a satire that drags out vices from their hiding-holes to flay them in sunshine? They had no hiding-holes. They affronted the daylight. But the question must be answered more comprehensively. The things told _are_--the corruption of our own spirit has engendered them--and every great city, in one age or another, is a Rome. Consult Cowper. To know such things is one bitter and offending lesson in the knowledge of our nature. For the pure and simple such records are not written. It is a galling disclosure, a frightful warning for the anomalous race of the proud-impure. Gifford finely said of this greatest of satirists, that, "disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he laboured with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display." The loveliness of virtue! Ay, in many a picture of the innocence and simplicity of the olden time--unelaborate but truthful--ever and anon presented for a few moments to show how happy humanity is in its goodness, and how its wickedness is degradation and misery. And there are many prolonged lofty strains sounding the praise of victorious virtue. They are for all time--and they, too, that magnify and glorify the spirit of liberty, then exiled from the city it had built, and never more to have dominion there, but regnant now in nations that know how to prize the genius it still continued to inspire when public virtue was dead.

Yet Dryden has not been altogether successful with Juvenal. In many places he is most slovenly--in many elaborately coarse beyond the coarseness ready-made to his hand--in some of the great passages, he leaves out what he feared to equal, and, in the face of all the principles in his own creed on Translation, he often paraphrases with all possible effrontery, and lets himself loose to what is called imitation, till the original evanishes, to return, however, on a sudden, apparition-like, and with a voice of power, giving assurance of the real Juvenal.

His criticism on Lucretius is characteristic of them both. See how rashly, we had almost said foolishly, he rates the Epicurean for his belief in the mortality of the soul. Were there no better reason afforded by the light of nature, for a belief in its immortality than what Dryden throws out, human nature would not so earnestly have embraced, and so profoundly felt, and so clearly seen, the truth of the Christian dispensation.

"If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of
that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of
perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an
easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied
his excellences; for the method of the Georgics is plainly derived
from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he,
therefore, adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of
morality, in the beginning and ending of his books, which you see
Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which, in
my opinion, are more perfect in their kind than even his divine
AEneid. The turn of his verses he has likewise followed in those
places where Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines
he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I
am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius, (I mean
of his soul and genius,) is a certain kind of noble pride, and
positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of
his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his
vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding
him attend, as if he had the rod over him; and using a magisterial
authority while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none
so like him as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury. This is that
perpetual dictatorship which is exercised by Lucretius, who, though
often in the wrong, yet seems to deal _bona fide_ with his reader and
tells him nothing but what he thinks; in which plain sincerity, I
believe, he differs from our Hobbes, who could not but be convinced,
or at least doubt of some eternal truths, which he has opposed. But
for Lucretius, he seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so
confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists;
urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving
them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this
too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the
triumph before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and
daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his
thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that
sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness
of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the
barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness
of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could
have been every where as poetical as he is in his descriptions, and
in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to
instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight. But he was bent
on making Memmius a materialist, and teaching him to defy an
invisible power; in short, he was so much an atheist, that he forgot
sometimes to be a poet. These are the considerations which I had of
that author, before I attempted to translate some parts of him. And,
accordingly, I laid by my natural diffidence and scepticism for a
while, to take up that dogmatical way of his, which, as I said, is so
much his character as to make him that individual poet. As for his
opinions concerning the mortality of the soul, they are so absurd,
that I cannot if I would, believe them. I think a future state
demonstrable even by natural arguments; at least, to take away
rewards and punishments, is only a pleasing prospect to a man who
resolves before hand not to live morally. But, on the other side, the
thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a
virtuous man, even though a heathen. We naturally aim at happiness,
and cannot bear to have it confined to the shortness of our present
being; especially when we consider that virtue is generally unhappy
in this world, and vice fortunate; so that it is hope of futurity
alone, that makes this life tolerable in expectation of a better. Who
would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his
natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is
alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead? If he be
cunning and secret enough to avoid the laws, there is no band of
morality to restrain him; for fame and reputation are weak ties; many
men have not the least sense of them. Powerful men are only awed by
them, as they conduce to their interest, and that not always, when a
passion is predominant; and no man will be contained within the
bounds of duty when he may safely transgress them. These are my
thoughts abstractedly, and without entering into the notions of our
Christian faith, which is the proper business of divines.

"But there are other arguments in this poem (which I have turned into
English) not belonging to the mortality of the soul, which are strong
enough to a reasonable man, to make him less in love with life, and
consequently in less apprehension of death. Such are the natural
satiety proceeding from a perpetual enjoyment of the same things; the
inconveniences of old age, which make him incapable of corporeal
pleasures, the decay of understanding and memory, which render him
contemptible, and useless to others. These, and many other reasons,
so pathetically urged, so beautifully expressed, so adorned with
examples, and so admirably raised by the _prosopopeia_ of nature, who
is brought in speaking to her children with so much authority and
vigour, deserve the pains I have taken with them, which, I hope, have
not been unsuccessful or unworthy of my author; at least, I must take
the liberty to own, that I was pleased with my own endeavours, which
but rarely happens to me; and that I am not dissatisfied upon the
review of any thing I have done in this author."

Lucretius is a poet of a sublimer order than Dryden. Yet have they psychical affinities. The rush of poetical composition characterizes both--a ready pomp and splendour--more prodigality than economy--bold felicity rather than finish, though neither is that wanting--mastery of language and measure--touches from the natural world, that fall in more as a colouring of style, than the utterances of a heart imbued with a deep love of nature. Indeed, if the genial belongs to the physiognomy of Dryden's writing, the cordial is hardly a constituent in the character of either poet, although at need both can find eloquent expression even for the pathetic. In both, if in different measure, a sceptical vein is inherent; but in Lucretius this arms itself in logic, and he appears in his cosmogony as a philosophical atheist. In Dryden it might seem rather a humour leaned to, because on that side lies the pleasure of mockery and scoffing. Lucretius pleads his philosophy like a man who is incredulous in earnest. But you can seldom say what it is that Dryden embraces with seriousness, unless it be, in his better and happier undertakings, his own part in executing the work. The subject-matter might seem almost always rather accidentally brought to him, than affectionately sought by him; once out of his hands, it is dismissed from his heart; he often seems utterly to have forgotten opinions and persons in whom, not long before, he had taken the liveliest interest--careless of inconsistencies even in the same essay, assuredly one of the most self-contradicting of mortals. No man, some say, has a right to question another's religious faith, but all men have a right to judge of the professed principles on which it has been adopted, when those principles have been triumphantly propounded to the public in controversial treatises of elaborate verse. To reason powerfully not only in verse but rhyme, is no common achievement, and such fame is justly Dryden's; but how would the same reasoning have looked in prose? His controversy with Stillingfleet shows--but so so. Does Lucretius write from a strong heart and a seduced understanding? Or, is it now to be quoted as a blameable unbelief that ridded itself of the Greek and Roman Heaven and Hell? There is one great and essential difference on the side of the Epicurean. An original poet, he seems to speak from a sweeping contemplation of the universe. We grudge that the boundless exuberance of painting should go to decorate the argumentation of an unfruitful system of doctrine. We want the sympathy with the purpose of the poet, that should for us harmonize the poem. He often strikes singularly high tones. Witness, among many other great passages, his argument on death, and his thunderstorm. And had the description of the heifer bemoaning and seeking her lost calf been Virgil's, we should have thought it had sprung from the heart of rural simplicity and love. Dryden and Lucretius agree in the negligent indifference which they show, when mere argumentation is in hand, to smoothness and ornament, and also in the wonderful facility with which they compel logical forms to obey the measure. There they are indeed truly great.

Lucretius's magnificent opening has invited Dryden to put forth his happiest strength. The profuse eloquence and beauty of the original is rendered. The passage, which may compete with any piece of translation in the language, is, with Dryden, a fragment:--

"Delight of human kind, and gods above,
Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love;
Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,
And breeds whate'er is born beneath the rolling skies;
For every kind, by thy prolific might,
Springs, and beholds the regions of the light.
Thee, goddess, thee the clouds and tempests fear,
And at thy pleasing presence disappear;
For thee the land in fragrant flowers is drest;
For thee the ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast,
And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blest.
For when the rising spring adorns the mead,
And a new scene of nature stands display'd,
When teeming buds, and cheerful greens appear,
And western gales unlock the lazy year;
The joyous birds thy welcome first express,
Whose native songs thy genial fire confess;
Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food,
Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.
All nature is thy gift; earth, air, and sea;
Of all that breathes; the various progeny,
Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.
O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain,
The leafy forest, and the liquid main,
Extends thy uncontroll'd and boundless reign;
Through all the living regions dost thou move,
And scatter'st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of love.
Since, then, the race of every living thing
Obeys thy power; since nothing new can spring
Without thy warmth, without thy influence bear,
Or beautiful or lovesome can appear;
Be thou my aid, my tuneful song inspire,
And kindle with thy own productive fire;
While all thy province, Nature, I survey,
And sing to Memmius an immortal lay
Of heaven and earth, and every where thy wondrous power display:
To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born,
Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn;
The rather then assist my muse and me,
Infusing verses worthy him and thee.
Meantime on land and sea let barbarous discord cease,
And lull the listening world in universal peace.
To thee mankind their soft repose must owe,
For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;
Because the brutal business of the war
Is managed by thy dreadful servant's care;
Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove
The pleasing pains of thy eternal love;
And panting on thy breast, supinely lies,
While with thy heavenly form he feeds his eyes.
When, wishing all, he nothing can deny,
Thy charms in that auspicious moment try;
With winning eloquence our peace implore,
And quiet to the weary world restore."

Excellent English! and excellently representative of the Latin!

Dryden sometimes estranges his language from vulgar use by a Latinism; (he, himself, insists upon this, as a deliberate act of enriching our poor and barbarous tongue;) and in his highest writings, even where he has good matter that will sustain itself at due poetical height, here and there he has touches of an ornamental, imitative, and false poetical diction. But that is not his own style--not the style which he uses where he is fully himself. This is pure English, simple, masculine; turned into poetry by a true life of expression, and by the inhering melody of the numbers. That Lucretian Exordium he must have written in one of his happiest veins--under the sting of the poetical oestrum. It is an instance where he was called to his task by desire.

In his greatest undertaking--his Translation of Virgil--he often had to write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on; and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes, when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it is not easy--when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought with his most loving and exquisite skill--wholly to shut the door of belief against the uncharitable suggestion,--that the Translator less livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical art.

The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road; and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of himself. The dexterous episode of Aristaeus, visited with a plague in his bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by ending consummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound tenderness,--the creating high and pure spirit of beauty--the outwardly watchful and sensitive eye and ear--with tones at will fetched by listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn, the sublime,--these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow motions and varying hues of the now visible mind--which on the stream of articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion changes, a power of music,--these all are surprisingly contained within the SEVENTY-FIVE VERSES which unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the twice-lost Eurydice.

It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to die--_Moritura!_ then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her companions.

"Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps,
Immanem ante pedes hydrum _moritura_ puella
Servantem ripas alta non vidit in herba."

At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers!

At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremos
Implerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiae arces,
Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus,
Atque Getae, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.

That the vivid emphasis of a stormy sorrow--given to a picture of sound in the foregoing verses, by that distinctiveness of the multitudinous repetition--declines in the melodious four English representatives to a greatly more generalized expression, must, one may think, be ascribed to Dryden's despair of reconciling in his own rougher tongue the geography and the music. Nevertheless, the version is evidently and successfully studied, to mourn and complain.

But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tear
With loud lament, and break the yielding air:
The realms of Mars remurmur all around,
And echoes to the Athenian shores resound.

It is good, but hardly reaches the purpose of the original clamour, so passionate, dirge-like, unearthly, and supernatural--at once telling the death--as they say that in some countries the king's death is never told in words, but with a clangour of shrieks only from the palace-top, which is echoed by voices to voices on to the borders of his kingdom--at once, we say, supplying this point of the relation, and impressing upon you the superhuman character of the mourners, who are able not only to deplore, but likewise mysteriously and mightily to avenge.

The next three lines are also, as might be presumed, at the height, for they describe the paragon of lovers and harpers harping his affliction of love--

Ipse cava solans aegrum testudine amorem,
Te dulcis conjux, te solo in litore secum,
Te veniente die, te decedente, canebat!

Musical, dolorous iteration, iteration! Musical, woe-begone iteration, iteration! What have we in English?

"The unhappy husband, husband now no more,
Did, on his tuneful harp, his loss deplore,
And sought his mournful mind with music to restore.
On thee, dear wife, in desarts all alone,
He call'd, sigh'd, sang; his griefs with day begun,
Nor were they finish'd with the setting sun."

Studied verses undoubtedly--musical, and mournful, and iterative. The two triplets of rhyme have unquestionably this meaning; and the bold choice of the homely-affectionate, "_dear wife_," to render the more ornate "_dulcis conjux_," is of a sincere simplicity, and as good English as may be. We see here a poetical method of equivalents--for "on _thee_ he _call'd, sigh'd, sang_," is intended to render the urgency and incessancy of _Te, Te, Te, Te!_ But the singular and purely Virgilian artifice of construction in the second and third line, is abandoned without hope of imitation.

Orpheus goes down into hell.

"Taenarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis,
Et caligantem nigra formidine lucum
Ingressus, Manesque adiit, Regemque tremendum,
Nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda."

"Even to the dark dominions of the night
He took his way, thro' forests void of light,
And dared amidst the trembling ghosts to sing,
And stood before the inexorable king."

They are good verses, and might satisfy an English reader who knew not the original: albeit they do not attain--how should they?--to the sullen weight of dark dread that loads the Latin Hexameters. Look at that--REGEMQUE TREMENDUM! And then, still, the insisting upon something more! To what nameless Powers do they belong--those unassigned hearts, that are without the experience and intelligence of complying with human prayers?

The infatuation--_dementia_--which, on the verge of the rejoined light, turns back too soon the head of Orpheus towards her who follows him, is by Virgil said to be

"Ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes!"

A verse awful by the measure which it preserves between the human of the first half--_ignoscenda quidem_--and the infernal of the second half--_scirent si ignoscere Manes_. It places before us, in comparison, the Flexible, which lives in sunshine upon the earth--and the Inflexible, which reigns in the gloom of Erebus underneath it.

What does Dryden? He takes down the still, severe majesty of Virgil by too much of the Flexible--by a double dose of humanity.

"A fault _which easy pardon might receive,
Were lovers judges_, or could Hell forgive."

It is remarkable that he has himself quoted the line of Virgil with great praise, as one that approaches, within measure, to an Ovidian "turn." He has himself overstepped the measure, and made it quite Ovidian.

The four verses which describe the fault of Orpheus, and the perception of it in hell, are unsurpassed:--

"Restitit; Eurydicenque suam jam luce sub ipsa,
Immemor, heu! victusque animi respexit. Ibi omnis
Effusus labor: atque immitis rupta tyranni
Foedera: terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."

Only note the growing pathos from the beloved name to the naming of the dread act. EURYDICEN--_suam_--_jam luce sub ipsa_--_immemor_--_heu!_-- _victusque animi_--RESPEXIT. Five links! Look, too, what a long way on in the verse that sin of backward-looking has brought you. There shall hardly be found another verse in Virgil which has a pause of that magnitude at that advance, in the measure. It is a great stretching on of the thought against the law of music, which usually controls you to place the logical in coincidence with the musical--stop; but here you are urged on into the very midst, and beyond the midst, of the last dactyl--a musical sleight which must needs heighten that feeling, impressed by the grammatical structure, of a voluntary delay,--of unwillingness to utter the word fraught with inevitable death--that mortal RESPEXIT! After this, there is here no poured out toil--no clashing and rending--No! here is the deep note of victory--the proclamation sounding out from the abyss that the prize which was carried off is regained. Thrice down--down--as low as the pools of Avernus breaks out a peal--

"Terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis."

This is the master with whom--and this the language, and this the measure with which--our translator competes--"_imparibus armis_."

"For, near the confines of ethereal light,
And longing for the glimmering of a sight,
The unwary lover cast his eyes behind,
Forgetful of the law, nor master of his mind.
Straight all his hopes exhaled in empty smoke,
And his long toils were forfeit for a look.
Three flashes of blue lightning gave the sign
Of covenants broke, three peals of thunder join."

The falling off--the failure at the end is deplorable indeed; yet Dryden recovers himself, and much of what follows is very fine.

The outline of the Iliad interests man's everyday heart. A wife carried off--the retaliation--an invasion or siege--a fair captive withheld from ransom--a displeased God sending a plague--a high prince wronged, offended, sullenly withdrawn to his tent--war prosperous and adverse--a dear friend lost and wailed--a general by his death reconciled--that death avenged--a dead son redeemed by his father, and mourned by his people,--To receive all this sufferance into the heart's depths, wants no specific association--no grounding historical knowledge. By virtue of those anthropical elements--which are, by a change of accidents, one to him and you, Homer, who happens to be a Greek, makes you one, and a Trojan too, or rather you are with him in the human regions, and that fact sufficeth for all your soul's desires. But, though no critic, and unversed in the laws of Epos, which by the way are only discoverable in the poem which he created in obedience to them, and that were first revealed to him from heaven by its inspiring genius--nevertheless, you are affected throughout all your being by those laws, and but by them could not have been made "greater than you know," by the Iliad. For the main action, or Achilleid, though you may not know it, has four great steps. From Achilles' wrong by Agamemnon to the death of Patroclus, is a movement of one tenor. From the death of Patroclus to the death of Hector, is an entirely new movement, though causally bound in the closest manner to that antecedent. The Games and Funeral of Patroclus is an independent action. The Restoration of Hector's body is a dependent, and necessarily springing action, having a certain subsistency within itself. To the whole the seat of moving power is the bosom of Achilles. All the parts have perfect inter-obligation. Cut away any one, and there would be not a perilous gash, but a detruncation fatal to the living frame. There is vital integrity from the beginning to the end. Nowhere can you stop till the great poet stops. Then you obtain rest--not glad rest; for say not that the Iliad ends happily. The spirit of war sits on the sepulchral mound of Hector expecting its prey, and the topmost towers of Ilion, in the gloom of doom, lower with the ruining that shall soon hide Mount Ida in a night of dust.

Forbid it, ye muses all! that we should whisper a word in dispraise of Maro. But for what it is, not for what it is not, we love the AEneid. The wafting over sea from an Asiatic to an Italian soil, and the setting there of the acorn, which by the decree of the Destinies shall, in distant ages, grow up into Rome, and the overshadowing Roman Empire--this majestic theme appeals to the reason, and to the reason taught in the history of the world. It is a deliberate, not an impassioning interest. And how dominionless over our sympathy has the glowing and tender-hearted Virgil, perhaps unavoidably, made the Hero, who impersonates his rational interest! How unlike is this AEneas to that Achilles, round whose young head, sacred to glory, Homer has gathered, as about one magnetic centre, his tearful, fiery, turbulent, majestic, and magnanimous humanities!

Confess we must, reluctantly, that AEneas chills the AEneid. It was not that Virgil had embraced a design greater than his poetical strength. But it was in more than one respect unfortunately, unpoetically, conditioned. That political foundation itself is to be made good by aggressive arms; and by tearing a betrothed and enamoured beautiful bride from the youthful and stately chivalrous prince, her lover, slain in fight against the invaders; whilst the poor girl is to be made over to a widower, of whose gallantry the most that we know is his ill-care of his wife, and his running away from his mistress.

And thus, alas! it cannot be denied, the design of the _AEneis_ is carried through without our great natural sympathies, as respects its end--against them as respects its means. An insuperable difficulty! Did Virgil mistake, then, in taking the subject? One hardly dares say so. The national tradition offers to the national Epic poet the national Epic transaction; and he accepts the offer. In doing so he allies by his theme his own to the Homeric Epos. With all this, however, we do feel that fiery, and all-powerful, and all-comprehensive genius projects the outline of the _Iliad_ upon the canvass; whilst in this poetical history of the Trojan plantation in Italy, we can ascribe to the general disposition and invention hardly more than a prudent and skilful intelligence. But the poetical soul, the creative fire then enters to possess the remainder of the task. Was, after all, a pitched battle not exactly the thing in the world the most kindly to the feelings and the best meted to the understanding of the poet, commissioned to renown with verse the people who fought more, and more successful, pitched battles than any other in the world?

Were Virgil to write now, and you had to allot him his theme, what would it be? A romance of knight-errantry? You would allot him none. You would leave him free to the suggestions of his own delicious spirit. But he thought himself bound to the Latin Epos. To speak in true critical severity, the _AEneis_ has no Hero. It has a HEROINE. And who, pray, is SHE? The seven-hilled Queen of the World. Like another Cybele, with her turreted diadem, and gods for her children, in her arms and in her lap. Herself heaven-descended--IMPERIAL ROME.

The two prophetical episodes--the Muster of the pre-existing ghosts before the eyes of the great human ancestor, Anchises, in his Elysium--and those anticipatory narrative Embossings of the Vulcanian shield, become in this view integral and principal portions of the poem. That reviewing beside that Elysian river, of the souls that are to animate Roman breasts, and to figure in Roman chronicles, gave opportunity to Virgil of one Prophecy that mingled mourning with triumph, and triumph with mourning. Victorious over the Punic--victorious over the Gallic foe--carrying to the temple the arms which he, a leader, stripped from a leader--the third consecrator of such spoils--goes Marcellus. But who is He that moves at the side of the hero? A youth, distinguished by his beauty and by his lustrous arms. The Souls throng, with officious tumult, about him--and how much he resembles his great companion! But on his destined brow sits no triumphal lustre--mists and night cling about his head. Who is it? AEneas enquires--and Anchises would fain withhold the reply. It is the descendant of that elder Marcellus; and promises, were fatal decrees mutable, to renew the prowess and praises of his famed progenitor. Fatal decrees might not change, and the nephew of Augustus, the destined successor of his reign, and the hopes of the Romans--OBIIT. You have often wept over Virgil's verses--here are Dryden's:--

"AEneas here beheld, of form divine,
A godlike youth in glittering armour shine,
With great Marcellus keeping equal pace;
But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face.
He saw, and wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide,
What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side?
'His son, or one of his illustrious name
How like the former, and almost the same!
Observe the crowds that compass him around;
All gaze, and all admire, and raise shouting sound:
But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread,
And night, with sable shades, involve his head.'
'Seek not to know (the ghost replied with tears)
The sorrows of thy sons in future years.
This youth (the blissful vision of a day)
Shall just be shown on earth, then snatch'd away.
The gods too high had raised the Roman state,
Were but their gifts as permanent as great.
What groans of men shall fill the Martian field!
How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield!
What funeral pomp shall floating Tyber see,
When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity!
No youth shall equal hopes of glory give,
No youth afford so great a cause to grieve.
The Trojan honour, and the Roman boast,
Admired when living, and adored when lost!
Mirror of ancient faith in early youth!
Undaunted worth, inviolable truth!
No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting-field
Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield.
Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force,
When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse.
Ah! couldst thou break through Fate's severe decree,
A new Marcellus shall arise in thee!
Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring,
Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring;
Let me with funeral flowers his body strow;
This gift which parents to their children owe,
This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!'"

Here is an excellent flow. The sorrow and the pride and the public love which are the life of the original, are all taken to heart by the translator, who succeeds in imparting to you the most touching of poetical eulogies. You find, as usually every where, that the vigorous purpose of the original is maintained, and well rendered, but that certain Virgilian fascinations, which--whether they bewitch your heart or your fancy or our ear, you do not know--are hardly given you back. Thus it might be very hard to say what you have found that you cannot forget again, in such a verse as that which introduces to your eye the subject of the more effusive praise.

"Atque hic AEneas, una namque ire videbat
Egregium forma juvenem, et fulgentibus armis."

Yet you do not again forget that second line.

Dryden's rendering is equivalent for the meaning, and unblameable.

"AEneas here beheld of _form divine,
A godlike youth in glittering armour shine_."

The phrase is even heightened; but it does not loiter, like that other, in your memory. The very heightening has injured the image--the shadow that shone brighter in simple words.

The shadow then thrown across--

"Sed _frons_ laeta parum"--

is well given, with a variation, by--

"But gloomy were his _eyes_."

The lightlessness is feelingly placed where the chief light should be.

The unequalled

"Ostendent terris hunc tantum Fata,"

so fully signifying the magnitude of the gift offered and withdrawn--so sadly the brief promise, and all so concisely, meets with a soft and bright rendering in

"The _blissful vision_ of a day."

But Dryden's "shown _on_ earth," less positively affirms the loss fallen upon the earth, than the Latin "shall show to the nations."

The praise involving the recollection of the manners which were--

"Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! invictaque bello
Dextera!"

is given with admirable fervour.

"Mirror of ancient faith, in early youth
Undaunted worth! inviolable truth!"

As for _those three words_ that smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to swooning--

"_Tu Marcellus eris!_"--

they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking away from that prophecy of intolerable grief--the call for the bestrewment of flowers--

"Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.--

_must_ be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich.

"Tu Marcellus eris.--Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.

There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not swooned, might have calmed her heart!

It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality--that he transcribes his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any one will be at the pains to look.

For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the following:--

A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men, distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body, and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow. Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into your own imagination--a snake soused upon by an eagle.

"So stoops the yellow eagle from on high,
And bears a speckled serpent through the sky,
Fastening his crooked talons on the prey:
The prisoner hisses through the liquid way;
Resists the royal hawk, and though oppresst,
She fights in columns and erects her crest:
Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens every scale,
And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail.
Against the victor all defence is weak;
The imperial bird still plies her with his beak,
He tears her bowels, and her heart he gores,
Then clasps his pinions and securely soars."

A glorious paraphrase!

This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat on horseback.

But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour with our poets of romance?--with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own Spenser? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince--who but CAMILLA?

We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which represent her in action.

She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king, fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant--this daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he swathes the babe in stripped bark--binds her to the shaft of his huge oaken spear--dedicates her with a prayer to the virgin goddess of woods, and of the woodland chase--hurls, from a gigantic hand, the weapon across the tempestuous flood--and, ere his pursuers have reached him, plunges in, breasts the waters, and, saving and saved, swims across. In the forest depths, amongst imbosoming hills, the rugged sire fosters the vowed follower of Diana. The nursling of the wild grows up a bold and skilled huntress; and now that war storms in the land, she, with her huntress companions, joins the war. Some unexplained reconciliation, or perhaps restoration, has taken effect; for, along with her armed maidens, she leads the troops of the Volscians. In the field she fights like a virago; but her entrance thither was against the desire of the goddess, for it dooms her to die. Her eager following of a gorgeously armed warrior exposes her to a treacherous aim, and she falls. The provident goddess had put her own bow, and an arrow from her own quiver, into the hands of a nymph chosen to execute the vengeance of the impending death, and that arrow flies to its mark.