Chapter VI (5)

This cynical lampoon is refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace, by which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power. And if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old,--namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at "My Cid, with the fleecy beard," in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of Socrates, "whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men"; of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, "The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever made,--an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him"; of Newton, who made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years; of Bacon, who "took all knowledge to be his province"; of Fontenelle, "that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years"; of Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopædia of science.

Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, "Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,"--he replies, "What if it is?" The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing them: such is the affirmative force of the constitution. But if you are enfeebled by any cause, the disease becomes strong. At every stage we lose a foe. At fifty years, 't is said, afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches. I hope this _hegira_ is not as movable a feast as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me that the rose-bugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July: they stay a fortnight later in mine. But be it as it may with the sick-headache,--'t is certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are lulled, once for all, as we come up with certain goals of time. The passions have answered their purpose: that slight, but dread overweight, with which, in each instance, Nature secures the execution of her aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror of death. To perfect the commisariat, she implants in each a little rapacity to get the supply, and a little over-supply, of his wants. To insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disorder, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office, and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then,--one mischief at a time,--this riotous time-destroying crew disappear.

I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing. Little by little, it has amassed such a fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three years old, he told me, "that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before." Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his client, but of none to himself. It is long already fixed what he can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from one or a dozen new performances. If he should, on a new occasion, rise quite beyond his mark, and do somewhat extraordinary and great, that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark with impunity, and people will say, "Oh, he had headache," or, "He lost his sleep for two nights." What a lust of appearance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps.

A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. Youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. Michel Angelo's head is full of masculine and gigantic figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, aesthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess of sensibility, to which every object glitters and attracts. We leave one pursuit for another, and the young man's year is a heap of beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for it, not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes. His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with delight the little white _Trientalis_, the only plant with seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in conformity with his system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for species: all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying all the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all clue to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind's ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs; and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the superstitious instinct with which we had hoarded it. We remember our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios, possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly stroking his leg, and assuring himself "he should retire from the University and read the authors." In Goethe's Romance, Makaria, the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence. Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point. Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received a stroke in every month or year of his life. A literary astrologer, he never applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore,--long enough to read everything that was worth reading,--"_Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago_." Much wider is spread the pleasure which old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles, reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his life: there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.

America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old note-book a record of a visit to Ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the election of his _son_ to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect, and worthy of his fame.

----, _Feb._, 1825. To-day, at Quincy, with my brother, by
invitation of Mr. Adams's family. The old President sat in a large
stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes,
white stockings, and a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made
our compliment, told him he must let us join our congratulations
to those of the nation on the happiness of his house. He thanked
us, and said, "I am rejoiced, because the nation is happy. The
time of gratulation and congratulations is nearly over with me: I
am astonished that I have lived to see and know of this event. I
have lived now nearly a century: [he was ninety in the following
October:] a long, harassed, and distracted life."--I said, "The
world thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it."--"The
world does not know," he replied, "how much toil, anxiety, and
sorrow I have suffered."--I asked if Mr. Adams's letter of
acceptance had been read to him.--"Yes," he said, and added, "My
son has more political prudence than any man that I know who has
existed in my time; he never was put off his guard: and I hope he
will continue such; but what effect age may work in diminishing
the power of his mind, I do not know; it has been very much on the
stretch, ever since he was born. He has always been laborious,
child and man, from infancy."--When Mr. J.Q. Adams's age was
mentioned, he said, "He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July";
and remarked that "all the Presidents were of the same age:
General Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about
fifty-eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr.
Monroe."--We inquired, when he expected to see Mr. Adams.--He
said, "Never: Mr. Adams will not come to Quincy, but to my
funeral. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see him, but I
don't wish him to come on my account."--He spoke of Mr. Lechmere,
whom "he well remembered to have seen come down daily, at a great
age, to walk in the old town-house,"--adding, "And I wish I could
walk as well as he did. He was Collector of the Customs for many
years, under the Royal Government"--E. said, "I suppose, Sir, you
would not have taken his place, even to walk as well as
he."--"No," he replied, "that was not what I wanted."--He talked
of Whitefield, and "remembered, when he was a Freshman in college,
to have come in to the _Old South_, [I think,] to hear him, but
could not get into the house;--I, however, saw him," he said,
"through a window, and distinctly heard all. He had a voice such
as I never heard before or since. He cast it out so that you might
hear it at the meeting-house, [pointing towards the Quincy
meeting-house,] and he had the grace of a dancing-master, of an
actor of plays. His voice and manner helped him more than his
sermons. I went with Jonathan Sewall."--"And you were pleased with
him, Sir?"--"Pleased! I was delighted beyond measure."--We asked,
if at Whitefield's return the same popularity continued.--"Not the
same fury," he said, "not the same wild enthusiasm as before, but
a greater esteem, as he became more known. He did not terrify, but
was admired."

We spent about an hour in his room. He speaks very distinctly for so old a man, enters bravely into long sentences, which are interrupted by want of breath, but carries them invariably to a conclusion, without ever correcting a word.

He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and "Peep at the Pilgrims," and "Saratoga," with praise, and named with accuracy the characters in them. He likes to have a person always reading to him, or company talking in his room, and is better the next day after having visitors in his chamber from morning to night.

He received a premature report of his son's election, on Sunday afternoon, without any excitement, and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was not yet time for any news to arrive. The informer, something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing to the meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the congregation, who were so overjoyed that they rose in their seats and cheered thrice. The Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard, that, whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Lectures on the Science of Languages_, delivered at the Royal
Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. By MAX
MÜLLER, M.A., Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford; Corresponding
Member of the Imperial Institute of France. London: Longman,
Green, Longman, & Roberts. 1861. 8vo. pp. xii., 399.

The name of Mr. Max Müller is familiar to American students as that of a man who, learned in the high German fashion, has the pleasant faculty, unhappily too rare among Germans, of communicating his erudition in a way not only comprehensible, but agreeable to the laity. The Teutonic _Gelehrte_, gallantly devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling hedge of abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated citations that take panglottism for granted as an ordinary incident of human culture, too hastily assumes a tenacity of life on the part of his reader as great as his own. All but those with whom the study of language is a specialty pass him by as Dante does Nimrod, gladly concluding

"Che così è a lui ciascun linguaggio,
Come il suo ad altrui, che a nullo è noto."

The brothers Grimm are known to what is called the reading public chiefly as contributors to the literature of the nursery; and as for Bopp, Pott, Zeuss, Lassen, Diefenbach, and the rest, men who look upon the curse of Babel as the luckiest event in human annals, their names and works are terrors to the uninitiated. They are the giants of these latter days, of whom all we know is that they now and then snatch up some unhappy friend of ours and imprison him in their terrible castle of Nongtongpaw, whence, if he ever escape, he comes back to us emaciated, unintelligible, and with a passion for roots that would make him an ornament of society among the Digger Indians.

Yet though in metaphor giants of learning, their office seems practically rather that of the dwarfs, as gatherers and guardians of treasure useless to themselves, but with which some luck's-child may enrich himself and his neighbors. Other analogies between them and the dwarfs, such as their accomplishing superhuman things and being prematurely subject to the dryness of old ago, ("_Der Zwerg ist schon im siebenten Jahr ein Greis_," says Grimm,) will at once suggest themselves.

Mr. Müller is one of the agreeable luck's-children who lay these swarthy miners under contribution for us, understand their mystic sign-language, and save us the trouble of climbing the mountain and scratching through the thickets for ourselves. Happy the man who can make knowledge entertaining! Thrice happy his readers! The author of these Lectures is already well known as not only, perhaps, the best living scholar of Sanscrit literature, (and by scholar we mean one who regards study as a means, not an end, and who is capable of drawing original conclusions,) but a _savant_ who can teach without tiring, and can administer learning as if it were something else than medicine. Whoever reads this volume will regret that Mr. Müller's eminent qualifications for the Boden Professorship at Oxford should have failed to turn the scale against the assumed superior orthodoxy of his competitor. Was it in Sanscrit that he was heterodox? or in Hindoo mythology?

The Lectures are nine in number. The titles of them will show the range and nature of Mr. Müller's dissertations. They are, (1.) On the science of language as one of the physical sciences; (2.) On the growth of language in contradistinction to the history of language; (3.) On the empirical stage in the science of language; (4.) On the classificatory stage in the same; (5.) On the genealogical classification of languages; (6.) On comparative grammar; (7.) On the constituent elements of language; (8.) On the morphological classification of languages; (9.) On the theoretical stage in the science of languages and the origin of language. An Appendix contains a genealogical table of languages; and an ample Index (why have authors forgotten, what was once so well known, that an index is all that saves the contents of a book from being mere birds in the bush?) makes the volume as useful on the shelf as it is interesting and instructive in the hand. Of the catholic spirit in which Mr. Müller treats his various topics of discussion and illustration, his own theory of the true method of investigation is the best proof.

"There are two ways," he says, in discussing the origin of
language, "of judging of former philosophers. One is, to put aside
their opinions as simply erroneous, where they differ from our
own. This is the least satisfactory way of studying ancient
philosophy. Another way is, to try to enter into the opinions of
those from whom we differ, to make them, our a time at least, our
own, till at least we discover the point of view from which each
philosopher looked at the facts before him and catch the light in
which he regarded them. We shall then find that there is much less
of downright error in the history of philosophy than is commonly
supposed; nay, _we shall find nothing so conducive to a right
appreciation of truth as a right appreciation of the error by
which it is surrounded_." (p. 360. The Italics are ours.)

A mere philologist might complain that the book contained nothing new. And this is in the main true, though by no means altogether so, especially as regards the nomenclature of classification, and the illustration of special points by pertinent examples. In this last respect Mr. Müller is particularly happy, as, for instance, in what he says of "Yes 'r and Yes 'm." (pp. 210 ff.) And as regards originality in the treatment of a purely scientific subject, a good deal depends on the meaning we attach to the term. If we understand by it striking conclusions drawn from theoretic premises, (as in Knox's "Races of Man,") clever generalizations from fortuitous analogies and coincidences insufficiently weighed, (as in Pococke's "India in Greece,") or, to take a philologic example, speculations suggestive of thought, it may be, but too insecurely based on positive data, (as in Rapp's "Physiologie der Sprache,") we shall vainly seek for such originality in Mr. Müller's Lectures. But if we take it to mean, as we certainly prefer to do, safety of conclusion founded on thorough knowledge and comparison, clear statement guarded on all sides by long intimacy with the subject, and theory the result of legitimate deduction and judicial weighing of evidence, we shall find enough in the book to content us. Mr. Müller does not now enter the lists for the first time to win his spurs as an original writer. The plan of the work before us necessarily excluded any great display of recondite learning or of profound speculation. Delivered at first as popularly scientific lectures, and now published for the general reader, it seems to us admirably conceived and executed. Easily comprehensible, and yet always pointing out the sources of fuller investigation, it is ample both to satisfy the desire of those who wish to get the latest results of philology and to stimulate the curiosity of whoever wishes to go farther and deeper. It is by far the best and clearest summing-up of the present condition of the Science of Language that we have ever seen, while the liveliness of the style and the variety and freshness of illustration make it exceedingly entertaining.

We hope that a book of such slight assumption and such solid merit, a model of clear arrangement and popular treatment, may be widely read in this country, where the ignorance, carelessness, or dishonest good-nature even of journals professedly literary is apt to turn over the unlearned reader to such blind guides as Swinton's "Rambles among Words," compounds of plagiarism and pretension. Philology as a science is but just beginning to assert its claims in America, though we may already point with satisfaction to several distinguished workers in the field. The names of Professor Sophocles, at Cambridge, and Professor Whitney, at New Haven, rank with those of European scholars; and we have already borne the warmest testimony in these pages to the value of Mr. Marsh's contributions to the study of English, a judgment which we are glad to see confirmed by the weighty authority of Mr, Müller.

* * * * *

1. _On Translating Homer_. Three Lectures given at Oxford by
MATTHEW ARNOLD, M.A., Professor of Poetry in the University of
Oxford, and formerly Fellow of Oriel College. London: Longmans.
1861. pp. 104.

2. _Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice_. A Reply to
Matthew Arnold, Esq., Professor of Poetry at Oxford. By FRANCIS W.
NEWMAN, a Translator of the Iliad. London: Williams & Norgate.
1801. pp. 104.

MR. F.W. NEWMAN, Professor of Latin in the University of London, probably without much hope of satisfying himself, and certain to dissatisfy every one who could read, or pretend to read, the original, did nevertheless complete and publish a translation of the "Iliad." And now, unmindful of Bentley's _dictum_, that no man was ever written down but by himself, he has published an answer to Mr. Arnold's criticism of his work. Thackeray has said that it is of no use pretending not to care if your book is cut up by the "Times"; and it is not surprising that Mr. Newman should be uneasy at being first held up as an awful example to the youth of Oxford in academical lectures, and then to the public of England in a printed monograph, by a man of so much reputation for scholarship and taste as the present incumbent of Thomas Warton's chair.

Mr. Arnold's little book is, we need scarcely say, full of delicate criticism and suggestion. He treats his subject with great cleverness, and on many points carries the reader along with him. Especially good is all that he says about the "grand style," so far as his general propositions are concerned. But when he comes to apply his criticisms, he instinctively feels the want of an absolute standard of judgment in aesthetic matters, and accordingly appeals to the verdict of "scholars,"--a somewhat vague term, to be sure, but by which he evidently understands men not merely of learning, but of taste. Of course, his reasoning is all _a posteriori_, and from the narrowest premises,--namely, from an unpleasant effect on his own nerves, to an efficient cause in the badness of Mr. Newman's translation.

No quarrels, perhaps, are so bitter as those about matters of taste: hardly even is the _odium theologicum_, so profound as the _odium æstheticum_. A man, perhaps, will more easily forgive another for disbelieving his own total depravity than for believing that Guido is a great painter or Tupper an inspiring poet. The present dispute, therefore, tenderly personal as it is on the part of one of the pleaders, is especially interesting as showing a very decided and gratifying advance in the civilization of literary men to-day as compared with that of a century or indeed half a century ago. If we go back still farther, matters were still worse, and we find Luther and even Milton raking the kennel for dirt dirty enough to fling at an antagonist. But even within the memory of man, the style of the "Dunciad" was hardly obsolete in "Blackwood" and the "Quarterly." It is very pleasant, in the present case, to see both attack and defence conducted with so gentlemanlike a reserve,--and the latter, which is even more surprising, with an approach to amenity.

In Mr. Newman the Professor of Poetry finds an able and wary antagonist, and one who, in point of learning, carries heavier metal than himself. The dispute turns partly on the character of Homer's poetry, partly on the true method of translation, (especially Homeric translation,) and partly on the particular merits of Mr. Newman's attempt as compared with those of others. Of course, many side-topics are incidentally touched upon, among others, the English hexameter, Mr. Newman's objections to which are particularly worthy of attention.

Mr. Newman instantly sees and strikes at the weak point of his adversary's argument. "You appeal to scholars," he says in substance; "you admit that I am one; now you _don't_ like my choice of words or metre; I _do_; who, then, shall decide? Why, the public, of course, which is the court of last appeal in such cases." It appears to us, that, on most of the points at issue, the truth lies somewhere between the two disputants. We do not think that Mr. Newman has made out his case that Homer was antiquated, quaint, and even grotesque to the Greeks themselves because his cast of thought and his language were archaic, or strange to them because he wrote in a dialect almost as different from Attic as Scotch from English. The Bible is as far from us in language and in the Orientalism of its thought and expression as Homer was from them; yet we are so familiar with it that it produces on us no impression of being antiquated or quaint, seldom of being grotesque, and what is still more to the purpose, produces that impression as little on illiterate persons to whom many of the words are incomprehensible. So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of Béranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as Homer, though an Ionian, was still a Greek. We think he does prove that neither Mr. Arnold nor any other scholar can form any adequate conception of the impression which the poems of Homer produced either on the ear or the mind of a Greek; but in doing this he proves too much for his own case, where it turns upon the class of words proper to be used in translating him. Mr. Newman says he sometimes used low words; and since his theory of the duty of a translator is, that he should reproduce the moral effect of his author,--be noble where he is noble, barbarous, if he be barbarous, and quaint, if quaint,--so he should render low words by words as low. But here his own dilemma meets him: how does he know that Homer's words _did_ seem low to a Greek? We agree with him in refusing to be conventional; so would Mr. Arnold; only one would call conventional what the other would call elegant, the question again resolving itself into one of personal taste. We agree with him also in his preference for words that have it certain strangeness and antique dignity about them, but think he should stop short of anything that needs a glossary. He might learn from Chapman's version, however, that it is not the widest choice of archaic words, but intensity of conception and phrase, that gives a poem life, and keeps it living, in spite of grave defects. Where Chapman, in a famous passage, ("Odyssey," v. 612,) tells us, that, when Ulysses crawled ashore after his shipwreck, "_the sea had soaked his heart through_," it is not the mere simplicity of the language, but the vivid conception which went before and compelled the simplicity, that is impressive. We believe Mr. Newman is right in refusing to sacrifice a good word because it may be pronounced mean by individual caprice, wrong in attempting the fatal impossibility of rescuing a word which to all minds alike conveys a low or ludicrous meaning, as, for example, _pate_, and _dopper_, for which he does battle doughtily. Mr. Newman is guilty of a fallacy when he brings up _brick, sell_, and _cut_ as instances in support of his position, for in these cases Mr. Arnold would only object to his use of them in their _slang_ sense. He himself would hardly venture to say that Hector was a _brick_, that Achilles _cut_ Agamemnon, or that Ulysses _sold_ Polyphemus. It is precisely because Hobbes used language in this way that his translation of Homer is so ludicrous. Wordsworth broke down in his theory, that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating "poetic diction." We think the proper antithesis is not between prosaic and poetic words, nor between the speech of actual life and a conventionalized diction, but between the language of _real_ life (which is something different from the actual, or matter-of-fact) and that of _artificial_ life, or society,--that is, between phrases fit to express the highest passion, feeling, aspiration, and those adapted to the intercourse of polite life, whence all violent emotion, or, at least, the expression of it, is excluded. This latter highly artificial and polished dialect is accordingly as suitable to the Mock-Heroic (like "The Rape of the Lock") as it is inefficient and even distasteful when employed for the higher and more serious purposes of poetry. It was most fortunate for English poetry that our translation of the Bible and Shakspeare arrested our language, and, as it were, crystallized it, precisely at its freshest and most vigorous period, giving us an inexhaustible mine of words familiar to the heart and mind, yet unvulgarized to the ear by trivial associations.

The whole question of Homeric translation in its entire range, between Chapman on the one hand and Pope and Cowper on the other, is opened afresh by this controversy. The difficulty of the undertaking, and still more of dogmatizing on the proper mode of executing it, is manifest from the fact that Mr. Newman is quite as successful in turning some specimens of Mr. Arnold's into ridicule as the latter had been with his. Meanwhile we commend the two little books to our readers as containing an able and entertaining discussion on a question of general and permanent interest, and as showing that the "Quarrels of Authors" may be conducted in a dignified and scholarly way.

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OBITUARY.

The last English steamer brings us the sad news of the death of Arthur Hugh Clough. Mr. Clough had so many personal friends, as well as warm admirers, in America, that his death will be felt by numbers of our readers both as a private grief and a public loss. The earth will not soon close over a man of more lovely character or more true and delicate genius. This is not the place or the occasion to do justice to the many eminent qualities of his heart and mind, and we only allude to his death at all because in him the "Atlantic" has lost one of its most valued contributors.