equivalent. To use De Quincey's happy image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not. coincide; the words overlap.

Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero's elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of Martial's jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,- never. As soon will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the “Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, especially in poetry, have a potency of association, a kind of necromantic power,- aside from their significance as representative signs. There is a mingling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not

the dress of thought; it is its living expression, and controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.

How many abortive attempts have been made to translate the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into English verse! What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of the grandest passages in the old bard! The one, it has been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epigrams, sparkling and cold as the Heroic Epistles of Ovid; the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans, the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded as an English poem, Pope's translation of the "Iliad" is unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into another language, it is but a caput mortuum, containing but little. more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness of the images, all that breathes of an earlier world, and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue sky, of the old Egean, all this, as a critic has observed, "is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary artist; instead of the ever-varied, resounding swell of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely-balanced modern couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes,

the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig, of the eighteenth century." Chapman, who has more of the spirit of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more successful in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some advantages by compensating defects.

Did Dryden succeed better when he put the "Eneid" into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodiment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English literature know what havoc Dryden made of "Paradise Lost," when he attempted, even in the same language, to put it into rhyme,- a proposal to do which drew from Milton the contemptuous remark: "Ay, young man; you can tag my rhymes." A man of genius never made a more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions of "the first finder of our faire langage" contain much admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer's. They are simply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, the exquisite tone of naïveté, which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his verse,- utterly vanish. Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply

because failure was inevitable, because this aroma of antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language, is sure to evaporate.

All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,― the essence, the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give the expression of one of Raphael's or Titian's masterpieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a manner of his own, without which the identity and truth of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must it not a fortiori be impossible to transport them faithfully across the barriers which divide one language from another, and antiquity from modern times?

How many ineffectual attempts have been made to translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imitation. All experience shows that the tradittore must necessarily be traduttore, the translator, a traducer of the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric.

The special imagination of the poet, it has been well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympathies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which another never could have extracted from them. It is of the very essence of the poet's art, so that, in the highest exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the rendering of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are at simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth fullgrown, in its panoply of radiant utterance.

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The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody ever so skillfully, and you change the effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skillful linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,- a barely