AS ONE THAT FOR A WEARY SPACE

BAS LAIN
LULLED BY THE SONG OF CIKCE AND HER WINE
IN GARDENS NEAR THE PAIE OF PROSERPINE,
WHERE THAT AAN ISLE FORGETS THE MAIN,
AND ONLY THE LOW LUTES OF LOVE COMPLAIN,
AND ONLY SHADOWS OF WAN LOVERS PINE.

AS SUCH AN ONE WERE GLAD TO KNOW THE BRINF
SALI ON HIS LIPS, AND THE LARGE AIR AGAIN,

SO GLADLY, FROM THE SONGS OF MODERN SPEECH

MEN TURN, AND SFE THE SIARS, AND FEEL THE FREI SHRILL WIND BEYOND THE CLOSE OF HEAVY FLOWERS AND THROUGH THE MUSIC OF THE LANGUID HOURS, THEY HEAR LIKE OCEAN ON A WESTERN BEACH

THE SURGE AND THUNDER OF THE ODYSSEY.

A. L.

THERE would have been less controversy about the proper, method of Homeric translation, if critics had recognised that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the Elizabethan age,Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely, daring, and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman's verse Troy must 'shed her towers for tears of overthrow, and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their sport must be called the horrid tennis.'

In the age of Anne, 'dignity' and 'correctness' had to be given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, his netteté, his command of every conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed tame, rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great

translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost point of view. Chaque siècle depuis le xvi a eu de ce côté son belvéder différent. Again, when Europe woke to a sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the ballads that Herder, Scott, Lönnrot, and the rest collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a ballad-minstrel, that the translator must imitate the simplicity, and even adopt the formulae of the ballad. Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr. Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The Epic poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some of the formulae of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the author of The Song of Roland, like the singers of the Kalevala, uses constantly recurring epithets, and repeats, word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and That custom is essential in the ballad, it is an accident not the essence of the epic. The epic is a poem of consummate and supreme art, but it still bears some birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of which it sprung, as the garden-rose springs from the wild stock. When this is recognised the demand for ballad-like simplicity and ballad-slang' ceases to exist, and then all Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to represent our conception of Homer. After the belief in the ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein in Homer, and, as a result, came Mr. Worsley's admirable Odyssey. This masterly translation does all that can be done for the Odyssey in the romantic style. The liquid lapses of the verse, the wonderful closeness to the original, reproduce

so on.