deep significance, does Paul say, "Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world!" Lord save thy people from the "deceitfulness of riches!" It is often said that riches harden the heart, but the declaration proves only a powerless cant phrase, unless we look at the reason why it hardens, and at the process by which this hardening is carried on. Yet it is plain on close reflection. The possession of wealth has a tendency to excite in the mind of its possessor a spirit of independence, which will soon degenerate into self-reliance and pride. It places him in a position where he may to some extent lord it over others; he is apt to feel that, in his circumstances, he stands over and above others, and this is something which the natural man, and even in the christian the remains of the natural man, loves. Here then it has a direct tendency to cultivate a spirit in direct opposition to the christian spirit-independence, self-reliance, and pride. Thus, a man as he increases in wealth is apt to lose gradually that sweet humility, that delightful sense of direct dependence upon God's providential care, and that daily implicit trust in Him from whom cometh down every good and perfect gift, which so much endears to the heart a kind heavenly Father. The man comparatively poor sits daily with childlike dependence at his father's table, and receives his bread directly from His hand, while the rich man eats in the house of a steward, getting all his mercies second-handed. From this sweet filial feeling every accession of wealth is a cold remove. More evident still is the fact, that as wealth increases, cares also increase to the possessor. His attention is called to different points often at the same time. His business becomes more and more complex and intricate. At one point his property is exposed to loss in unfaithful hands; at another by the ebb of trade; at another, part of his stock is going to waste for want of attention; at another still, there is dead stock for want of moving. He has, it is true, his stewards, foremen, and clerks; but men are selfish and often unfaithful, so that he must still have an eye over all. Thus his spirit is divided, restless, and absorbed. In the evening, when he would give his last thoughts to God, the vexations of the day come plodding home in mass to be the companions of his fireside, and to haunt his pillow. At night" dreams come through the multitude of business," and his restless spirit enjoys not even in sleep a respite from care. In the morning, when he would send his first thoughts out to God, they are soon entangled in the webs of business, which are in a moment spun around him. He rises a slave !-to be held again, under the task not of one but of many masters! Gradually the cultivation of his heart is neglected entirely, or made a secondary matter; his office of priest in the family is either laid aside or attended to in a cold, hasty, and distracted manner. In short, the spirit of the world has invaded first his own heart, then his closet, and last but worst of all, the sacred retirement of the family circle, where his children are bound in the spirit of gain to be offered as willing victims on the altar of Mammon. Let the consequences be pondered. Oh that the following sentence, and the sentiment, true as God himself, which it contains, were written upon the heart of every rich man's heart, in letters of more fearful fire than those which once recorded Belshazzar's doom upon his palace walls: THE MORE WEALTH A MAN GETS, THE MORE ARE HIS RESPONSIBILITIES INCREASED THE MORE WEALTH A MAN GETS, THE LESS DOES HE BECOME QUALIFIED AND DISPOSED TO DISCHARGE THESE RESPONSIBILITIES! Terrible and alarming condition! Who then, that is rich can be saved? Is there no remedy. None, except that which will keep us from getting unduly rich. Is it asked how this can be done? We answer, as your wealth increases, so let the Lord's portion increase, which you regularly lay by in store for Him. Lancaster. H. H. PROGRESS IN THE ART OF TRANSLATING. In one thing I am constrained to acknowledge that some of the poets of the present age surpass any that have gone before them. They are decidedly better hands at translating. In original poetry, no doubt, they often fall short of their predecessors, but in the art of bringing over the thoughts of others into their own languages they are certainly better skilled. In works translated by earlier poets we are not often permitted to come into immediate contact with the old authors themselves. In being renovated and dressed off in a new language, of many of their old fashioned traits with their old costumes they have been unfortunately divested. The translators of ancient poems, to adapt them better to the tastes of their times and countries could not help transfusing into them a good deal of their own national modes of thought, to the exclusion of what they deemed all too foreign end barbaric. Thus their own mental and moral features show themselves often more prominent than those of the original composers. In this respect, however, some of our more modern poets have succeeded better. They have endeavored to enter more fully into the feelings and conditions of their authors and their times, and to bring them over into their respective languages as little injured as possible. As yet in this art, I admit, they have not arrived at perfection. Of their intermediate faces we may still catch some occasional glimpses; but from their present advancement I cannot help fancying that ere long the day will come when these will be made wholly invisible; when literary feasts from foreign lands will be spread before us, their bestowers, all the while remaining, like good fairies, unseen; when the choicest grapes from other climes will be presented to us not dried nor candied but fresh and blooming as when taken from the vines. "A lad in the choice of his words and in the style of his sentences," saith the late Dr. Arnold in an Article on the Use of the Classics, "should be taught to follow the analogy required by the age and character of the writer whom he is translating. For instance, in translating Homer, hardly any words should be employed except Saxon and the oldest and simplest of those which are of French origin; and the language should consist of a series of simple propositions connected with one another only by the most inartificial conjunctions. In translating the tragedians the words should be principally Saxon but mixed with many of French or foreign origin, like the language of Shakspeare and the other dramatists of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I." Such sentiments show an advancement in our day in the art of translating. To the learned writers in the first half of the eighteenth century how proposterous would they have sounded! The language of their own times they regarded as the standard of perfection to which all ancient writings of worth should properly be reduced; and they translated into it even many of their older native poets. Their highly polished verses they conformed to rule as exactly as did some of the gardeners of those days their clipped hedges and shrubbery, and their euphony and gran deur they attempted, especially about the middle of this centu ry, to improve by the employment of many ornate words introduced immediately from the Latin and Greek without having received them, in the old round-about way, through the Norman French. Notwithstanding all their pains, however, their age is now regarded as being the most unpoetical in the history of English literature. By means of the good old Saxon employed in our present version of the Old Testament, which providentially was rendered into English not later than the age of James the First, how admirably the simple manners of the patriarchs are described! How touchingly the stories of Isaac and Rebekah, of Joseph and his brethren, of Naomi and Ruth, for instance, are set forth and how much would they lose in vividness and pathos by being told in more modern English! What sublimity is retained in the Psalms and most of the Prophets thus rendered! The heroic times of ancient Greece in spirit and manners correspond, in a great measure, to the patriarchal times of the Old Testament. Of course then the works that describe these, in being translated into English, should by all means be set forth, whether in prose or verse, in the same unsophisticated mode of speech. The simple majesty of the Iliad, however, so well exhibited by Homer in his olden dialect, is almost entirely obscured, it is well known, in the translation of it by Pope. Every thing there is brought too far forward into the refined times of civilization. Of the old heroes the noble simplicity which distinguished them is in a great measure done away with by their being made to express themselves in the polished language of the modern drawing-room. Those fine comparisons too, in which Homer abounds, drawn immediately from nature, Pope must needs be trying to improve by a few superadded touches of his own and art's. He must be endeavoring to set them off more splendently, to be sure, by throwing in some colors not to be found in the original but of his own superior mixing. While burnishing them up, however, and heightening, in this way, their beauties, as he fancies, how often, alas! doth he obliterate in them what, in the original constitutes, their highest charm, their truthfulness to outward nature!' 'As a striking specimen of this, his improved translation of Homer's admired moonlight scene, in the eighth book of the Iliad, has been often quoted: "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night! But though the writers in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First were mostly happier in their language than their successors in the reign of Anne and those afterwards, I would by no means wish to assert that as translators they surpassed them in all other respects. Into appropriate English prose for turning some of the old classic authors, on account of their congenial simplicity, they were certainly well qualified, but most of them, it must be said, fell short when they attempted versification. They had not yet discovered the most suitable rhythms into which the respective measures of the old poets could be best converted. Chapman, for instance, in his translation of Homer, instead of using ten-syllabled blank verse, which himself and other cotemporary dramatists have properly done in their plays, unfortunately adopted a line of fourteen syllables, supposing, with many others in his day, that this constituted the true English heroic. Susceptible it is, to be sure, of great simplicity and pathos, being in fact the old English ballad line unbroken into two; but it cannot receive into English any thing like the full grandeur of the Grecian Epos as exhibited in hexameter. His verse being longer than Homer's required a filling up on his part, which encouraged, it is likely, his disposition towards expansion, frequently carried out into whole lines of his own; while, on the other hand, to keep his book in compass, no doubt, he has just as often retrenched with as free a hand. Thus not so much a literal translation has he given us as an extended paraphrase. Striving after the sublimity of his author too, of which his measure was not fully susceptible, he was sometimes borne aloft into something like rant and fustian. Still being gifted with a truly epic genius, his work is racy and spirited throughout, having about it all the rich flavor of antiquity; the genuine smack of an old wine; partaking not so much, however, of the Pramnian of Homer as of the good old brown stout-xpioivos clvos-of English brewing. "I knew there was a style somewhere," says Cowper in one "Here," says Southey," are the planets rolling round the moon; here is the pole gilt and glowing with stars; here are trees made yellow and mountains tipt with silver by the moonlight; and here is the whole sky in a flood of glory; appearances not to be found either in Homer or in nature; finally these gilt and glowing skies, at the very time when they are thus pouring forth a flood of glory, are represented as a blue vault! The astronomy in these lines would not appear more extraordinary to Dr. Herschell than the imagery to every person who has observed a moonlight scene."-Quart. Rev. Vol. xii, page 87. |