AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE—III.
The work of translation seems in an odd way to enlist that mimetic impulse which is so strong an element of human nature, and which is really at the bottom of so much of human rivalry. To wish to do as much as others in any given line of effort is but an after-thought, a secondary motion of the mind; the initial instinct is to do the same as they. That men do not rest at this; that they are not content with merely duplicating what they see done about them, like the late lamented Mr. Pongo; that they are for ever seeking “to better their instruction,” is due to that further instinctive yearning for perfection which helps to differentiate them from Mr. Pongo, and interferes so sadly with many most ingenious and scientific schemes for recreating the universe without a Creator. All literatures, it may be said, all poets, begin with translation—that is, with imitation of some other literature or poet. Alcæus and Sophron, no doubt, are but Horace and Theocritus to the unknown who went before them; Homer is first, doubtless, only because we know not the greater than Homer—rapt from us by the irrevocable years—whom Homer may have copied, as Virgil copied Homer.
This, however, is a law of literature which was known as long ago as the days of Solomon, at least. What is not so obvious, and even more curious as well as more to the present point, is why translators under certain conditions should be so fond of repeating one another in regard to any particular bit of work.
For a generation or so some one of the poets who are the favorite objects of the translator’s zeal will be neglected and seemingly forgotten. Then some day appears a version which attracts attention and gets talked of, and, presto! a dozen pens are in eager chase to rival or surpass it. Now it is Homer which is thus brought into notice, and we have Professor Newman, Lord Derby, Mr. Wright, Mr. Worsley, Mr. Dart, Professor Blackie, Mr. Bryant—what muse shall catalogue the host?—giving us in quick succession and in every kind of metre their versions of the Iliad or Odyssey, or both? Again it is Virgil, and within a brief interval Professor Conington, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Cranch have done the Æneid into English. Or once more Horace sways the hour, and in a twinkling or thereabouts a dozen translations of the Odes are smoking hot from the press on the critic’s table, and bewildering him to choose among their various merits. Within the last half-century, nay, within the last twenty-five years, we have seen just this revolution. Is it because our own is so peculiarly one of those transitional periods in the history of a literature which are most favorable to translation—indeed, most provocative of it; one of those intervals when the national imagination is, as it were, lying fallow after the exhaustion of some great creative epoch, and intellectual effort takes chiefly the form of criticism, which in one sense translation is? Well, such generalizations are as perilous as they are fascinating and we must not yield to them too rashly. In this case, if we did yield, we should be told, no doubt, that translation was no more a peculiarity of a transitional period than of a creative one; that the notion of such divisions in the history of a literature is preposterous and but another invention of the arch-enemy, like comparative philology and the Eastern question, to set the mildest and wisest of sages—even ourselves, beloved reader—thirsting for each other’s blood; or that, finally, an epoch which has produced Tennyson and Browning, De Vere and Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and—let nothing tempt us back to our own side of the Atlantic, where poets grow like pumpkins, big and little, in every garden patch; yet surely, if originality goes for anything, we may add—Tupper—that a time so prolific of poetic genius is not to be counted a transitional period at all.
This, or something like it, we should no doubt hear, if we ventured upon putting forth as our own the enticing proposition we have but modestly thrown out as a suggestion to the reader. And if we were not withheld by that providential want of time and opportunity which so often saves us from our rasher selves, we should no doubt go on to make the venture even now: to assert that, in spite of Tennyson and Browning, in spite even of Matthew Arnold—in one sense a truer voice of his time than either of them—in spite of the pagan and mediæval renaissance piloted by that wonderfully clever coterie of the Rossettis, the present can in no sense be called a creative epoch in our literature, as we call creative the two epochs of which Shakspeare and Wordsworth are, broadly speaking, the representative names—representative, however, in different ways and in widely different degrees; that it is, on the contrary, a true transitional period, as the period of Pope and Dryden was transitional, and for analogous reasons; and that, because it is so, the art of translation flourishes now as then. Nor should we forget, in saying this, the numerous translations which marked the Elizabethan era. But it is to be noted that while all, or nearly all, the then extant classics were turned into English before the close of the Elizabethan era, translations of any one of them were not repeated, and precisely for this reason: that the age, being a creative epoch, made its main effort in the direction of knowledge, and not of criticism—sought to acquire ideas, and not to arrange them, as was the case with the translating periods which came after it. Then, too, it was the virtual beginning of our literature, when translation, as we have said, came natural to it. Chaucer two hundred years before was a creative poet, if the term may be used, in a time that was not creative, a time that was not his, a time whose sluggishness not even his pregnant genius could inform; Chaucer was the glad premature swallow of a lingering, long-delaying spring, whose settled sunshine came to us only with Spenser’s later bird-song,
“Preluding those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.”
Milton may be said to have concluded, as Spenser preluded, that mighty time, without fairly belonging to it. They belonged rather to each other. “Milton has owned to me,” says Dryden, “that his original was Spenser.” They were the epilogue and the prologue of that mighty opening chorus of our literature, in which the translators, too, had their parts, but only as prompters to the great singers, to help them to add to their native melody here and there some sweetness of a foreign note.
The time of critical translation, of translation for its own sake, as an art, came in only with Dryden—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of the transition poets. Then, too, translators began first to repeat each other’s work. Before the year 1580 most of the classic poets had been translated into English verse. They were not duplicated, because, as we have said, the time wanted first of all the knowledge of them, and it was not fastidious as to the shape in which it came. For a hundred years after its appearance Phaer’s version of the Æneid had no rival. Then came Vicars’, only to disappear almost as quickly. Doubly lapped in lead, it sank at once in that Stygian pool where Dulness tries the weight of her favorites, and there it has since remained, like Prospero’s book and staff, drowned
“Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”
Undeterred by this untoward fate, John Ogilby brought out his translation soon after, first at Cambridge and again in London, “adorned with sculptures and illustrated with annotations”—“the fairest edition,” grave Anthony à Wood assures us, “that till then the English press ever produced.” This gorgeous work, pronounced by Pope to be below criticism, nevertheless went through four editions before descending to the congenial fellowship of Vicars under the forgetful wave—a proof how much a good English version of the Æneid was desired. Ogilby had been a dancing-master, and perhaps learned in his profession to rival Lucilius, who
“In hora sæpe ducentos
Ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno.”[[172]]
At all events, although he took to literature late in life—he was past forty before he learned Latin or Greek—he was a prodigious author, as we learn from the Dunciad:
“Here groans the shelf with Ogilby the great.”
Besides translating remorselessly everything he could lay hands on, from Homer to Æsop, he found time to write various heroic poems, and had even completed an epic in twelve books on Charles I., when fate took pity on his fellows and sent the great fire of London to the rescue. Phillips, in the Theatrum Poetarum, styles Ogilby a prodigy, and avers that his “Paraphrase on Æsop’s Fables” “is generally confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that kind.”[[173]] As Milton’s nephew can scarcely be suspected of a joke, we must conclude that this is not one of the critical judgments which Milton inspired. Nevertheless, Ogilby’s translations and paraphrases procured him a “genteel livelihood” which many better poems have failed to do for their authors.
Neither Vicars nor Ogilby, however, was of sufficient note, nor had their labors sufficient vitality, to set the current of translation fairly going. That was reserved for Dryden, whose famous work came out in 1697. Dryden had all the qualifications necessary to ensure him a full harvest of imitation and rivalry at once. He was the most famous poet and critic of his day, and in either capacity had found means to excite abundance of jealousies and resentments. Moreover, his change of religion, and the vigor with which he had espoused the Catholic cause in his Hind and Panther, made him many additional enemies. So it is not to be wondered at that when, as Pope puts it,
“Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose
In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux,”
the parsons led the onslaught. First came Parson Milbourn, “the fairest of critics,” who printed his own version side by side with the one he found fault with, and whom Dulness also promptly claimed for her own. Then Dr. Brady, giving over to his worthy coadjutor, Tate, for the nonce the herculean task of promoting Sternhold and Hopkins to be next to the worst poets in the world, devoted himself to the equally gigantic labor of proving that there was a work he could translate more abominably than the Psalms. His version in blank-verse, “when dragged into the light,” says Dr. Johnson, “did not live long enough to cry.” Then Dr. Trapp, the Oxford professor of poetry—majora viribus audens—rushed to the attack and did the Æneid into, if possible, still blanker verse than his predecessor’s. It was he who said of Dryden’s version “that where Dryden shines most we often see the least of Virgil.” This was true enough; and it was, no doubt, to avoid the like reproach that the good doctor forbore to shine at all. On him was made the well-known epigram apropos of a certain poem said to be better than Virgil:
“Better than Virgil? Yes, perhaps;
But then, by Jove, ’tis Dr. Trapp’s!”
This is only another form of Bentley’s famous judgment: “A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” The doctor has had no better luck than his fellows.
“Olli dura quies oculos et ferreus urguet
Somnus; in æternam clauduntur lumina noctem.”[[174]]
These efforts of the parsons, however, were no doubt inspired at least as much by odium theologicum as by the genuine impulse of emulation. The first true exemplification of this came about 1729 with the version of Pitt,[[175]] whose choice of Dryden’s couplet was a direct challenge. Johnson’s estimate of the success of this rivalry is not, on the whole, unfair—or, at least, as fair as such comparisons often are. “Dryden,” he says, “leads the reader forward by his general vigor and sprightliness, and Pitt often stops him to contemplate the excellence of a single couplet; Dryden’s faults are forgotten in the hurry of delight, and Pitt’s beauties neglected in the languor of a cold and listless perusal; Pitt pleases the critics and Dryden the people; Pitt is quoted and Dryden read.” Dryden, however, is probably oftener read nowadays than Pitt is quoted. It is something to be a poet after all, and in the exchange of translation we allow for the purity of his metal and the beauty of his coinage. Most of us would rather have the gold of Dryden, though it fall a piece or two short in the reckoning, than the small change of Pitt, though every silver sixpence and copper farthing be accounted for.
Other translations of the Æneid there were during the eighteenth century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins, but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was published soon after Pitt’s Æneid, diverted attention to the Greek poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the Iliad, a performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true, Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the Iliad in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold assures us, really on a complete equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some thirty years later, until the critical furore created by the appearance of Prof. Conington’s Æneid about ten years since once more turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.
Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised, it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to originality upon that score. But then it is the first American translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.
For as each age, so every country, looks at a classic author through spectacles of its own. “Each age,” as Conington well says in his preface, “will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it”; and it is for this reason, he adds, “that the great works of antiquity require to be translated afresh from time to time to preserve their interest as part of modern literary culture.” But it is not alone that each age will understand an author better than preceding ages; it will understand him differently; it will see him in another light, from far other points of view, modified and interpreted by its own spirit. What Heyne says of the poet is in a measure true of the translator—that he has the genius of his era, which must necessarily qualify his work. We have sometimes fancied even that this business of translation was a kind of metempsychosis through which the poet’s soul shall speak to many different times and lands through forms and in voices changing to suit the moods of each. This, of course, is only one of those fantastic notions which a writer must sometimes be indulged in, if he is to be kept in reasonable good-humor. But we think we may venture to say that two nations translating for themselves what antiquity has to say to them will insensibly find its utterances modified for each of them by their natural modes of thought. Nay, may we not go further and say that no two human minds will find precisely the same message in Homer or Virgil or Horace—so infinite are the gradations of thought, so innumerable the shades of meaning and suggestion in a word. Of Virgil this is especially true; for he has, says Prof. Conington, “that peculiar habit, ... common to him and Sophocles, of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one.”
It is just for this reason that repeated translations of a great author are not only useful but desirable; that, to quote Conington again, “it is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil; it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.” How true this is no one can fail to perceive who contrasts Dryden’s method in any given passage with Conington’s. The sense of Virgil may be given with equal exactness by each—we say may be, which is rather stretching a point, for, in respect of verbal fidelity, the two versions are not to be compared—the interpretation may be equally poetical, but there will remain a subtle something which stamps each, and which we can only say is the flavor of the time. Or, again, compare the Abbé Delille’s French version with Dryden’s English—perhaps a fairer comparison; for both are equally free, though by no means equally acquainted with their author, and both to a certain extent belonged to the same school of composition. Nor are they so very far apart as they seem in point of time; the century or so which divides them was a very much longer period in England than in France. Charles II. was nearer to Louis XV. than to George III. in point of taste. Yet how different from Dryden’s Virgil, or from any Englishman’s, is Delille’s, even though he does not find in his text such enchanting gallicisms as Jean Regnault de Segrais could twist out of the lines,
“Ubi templum illi centumque Sabæo
Thure calent aræ, sertisque recentibus halant”:[[176]]
“Dans le temple où toujours quelque Amant irrité
Accuse dans ses vœux quelque jeune Beauté.”
This is an extreme case, no doubt, and there are Frenchmen even who would not be beyond laughing at it. We are not to forget, as we laugh at it ourselves, that Segrais was not unknown in the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that although his own poetry was not all of this order, not even his Æneid—Saint-Evremond liked it—he also wrote novels which not even the Hôtel Rambouillet could read. But when that really able man and accomplished scholar, Cardinal Du Perron, turns Horace’s lines in the charming farewell to Virgil (Carm. i. 3):
“Ventorumque regat Pater
Obstrictis aliis præter Iapygia,”
into this sort of thing:
“Ainsi des vents l’humide Père
Ton cours heureusement tempere,
Tenant ses enfants emplumez
Si bien sous la clef enfermez
Excepté l’opportun Zephyr,”
we have a version which no doubt seems correct and poetical enough to a Frenchman, but to an English mind suggests nothing so much as a damp and aged poultry-fancier locking up his chickens in the hen-house out of the rain. And a countryman of the cardinal can make nothing more of the “laughing eyes” of Dante’s Piccarda:
“Ond’ ella pronta e con occhi ridenti,”[[177]]
than
“L’ombre me repondit d’un air satisfait!”
as though the celestial phantom had been a small girl bribed with a tart to answer. To the post-academic Gaul, shivering in the chaste but chilly shadow of that awful Pantheon of the verbal proprieties, the “Marguerite aux yeulx rians et verds” whom his forebears loved to sing would be but a green-eyed monster indeed. Ronsard’s parodies of Pindar were no worse than Ambrose Philips’ travesties of the deep-mouthed Theban—the sparrow-hawk aping the eagle—and not much worse, indeed, than West’s or even Wheelwright’s, or any other imitation of the inimitable that we have seen. But the badness of the one is thoroughly French and of his time, even to his bragging that it was his noble birth which enabled him to reproduce Pindar, wherein Horace, for lack of that virtue, had failed; the badness of the other as thoroughly English and of his age. And what more salient instance could be given of this natural difference in mental constitution, in “the way of looking at things,” than Voltaire’s treatment of the scene in Hamlet where the sentinel answers the question, “Have you had quiet guard?” by the familiar household idiom, “Not a mouse stirring”? “Pas un souris qui trotte” the author of Zaire makes it, and proceeds to inform his countrymen that this Shakspeare was a drunken savage.
Now, while there is no such radical difference between English and American ways of thought as between English and French ways, there is still difference enough to justify us in giving place to Mr. Cranch’s blank-verse Æneid, as being à priori another thing from the English blank-verse Æneids of forty or one hundred and forty years ago. So, without more ado, let us repeat that these three versions of the last decade are sufficiently unlike one another or any that have gone before to warrant attentive notice.
In choosing for the vehicle of his attempt the octosyllabic line—the well-known metre of Scott’s Marmion—Prof. Conington turned his back intrepidly on all the traditions. Scarcely any rhythm we have would seem at first blush worse fitted to give the unlearned reader an adequate idea of the sonorous march of the Latin hexameter or of the stately melody of Virgil’s verse, of the dignity of his sentiments, or the noble gravity of his style. For him who uses such a metre to render the Æneid one half anticipates the need of some such frank confession as that Ronsard, in a fit of remorse, or perhaps a verbal indigestion over his own inconceivable pedantry, puts at the end—at the end, mark you—of one of his never-ending series of odes:
“Les François qui mes vers liront,
S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains,
En lieu de ce livre, ils n’auront
Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains”—
which for our present purpose we may paraphrase: My excellent reader, if you don’t know Virgil as well as I do, you will find very little of him here, and if you do you will find still less. But Professor Conington soon puts away from us all such forebodings. He gives us, in spite of his metre, for the most part, in rare instances, by the help of it, a great deal of Virgil—more, on the whole, than almost any other of the poet’s translators. He has put the story of the Æneid into bright and animated English verse which may be read with pleasure as a poem for itself, and is yet strictly faithful to the sense and spirit of its original, as close as need be—wonderfully close in many parts—to its language, often skilfully suggestive of some of the most salient peculiarities of its form, and only failing conspicuously, where all translations most conspicuously fail, in rendering the poet’s manner, because the manner of any poet—and we mean by manner that union of thought and form of the poet’s way of seeing with his way of saying things which is the full manifestation of his genius—only failing here because this part of any poet it is next to impossible to reproduce in a foreign tongue, and because the vehicle chosen by Prof. Conington, so opposite in every way to Virgil’s vehicle, increased that difficulty tenfold. But a translation of a long narrative poem is not like the translation of a brief lyric. Is the former to be written for those who understand the original and care for no translation, or for those who, not understanding the original, ask first of the translator that he shall not put them to sleep, and, second, that he shall give them all that his author gives as nearly as possible in the same manner? Two of these demands Prof. Conington’s version fully meets, and it comes as near to the third as was consistent with a metre which gave him the best chance of combining the other two. If any translation of Virgil can hope to be popular it is his; and we hold to the belief that it will share with Dryden’s, which, if only for its author’s sake, will live, the affections of the unlatined English reader for long to come.
As might be expected, it is in battle-pieces and in scenes of swift and animated action, to which Scott’s metre naturally lends itself, and with which it is as naturally associated, that this version chiefly excels. Take, for example, the onset in the eleventh book:
“Meantime the Trojans near the wall,
The Tuscans and the horsemen all,
In separate troops arrayed;
Their mettled steeds the champaign spurn,
And, chafing, this and that way turn;
Spears bristle o’er the fields, that burn
With arms on high displayed.
Messapus and the Latian force,
And Coras and Camilla’s horse,
An adverse front array;
With hands drawn back they couch the spear,
And aim the dart in full career;
The tramp of heroes strikes the ear,
Mixed with the charger’s neigh.
Arrived within a javelin’s throw,
The armies halt a space; when, lo!
Sudden they let their good steeds go
And meet with deafening cry;
Their volleyed darts fly thick as snow,
Dark-shadowing all the sky.”
The Latin could scarcely be given with more spirit or closeness; though in neither respect does Morris fall short of his predecessor, from whom in manner, however, he differs toto cœlo:
“But in meanwhile the Trojan folk the city draw anigh,
The Tuscan dukes and all their horse in many a company
Well ordered; over all the plain, neighing, the steed doth fare,
Prancing and champing on the bit that turns him here and here.
And far and wide the lea is rough with iron harvest now,
And with the weapons tost aloft the level meadows glow.
Messapus and the Latins swift, lo! on the other hand,
And Coras with his brother-lord, and maid Camilla’s band,
Against them in the field; and, lo! far back their arms they fling
In couching of the level spears, and shot-spears brandishing.
All is afire with neigh of steeds and onfall of the men.
And now, within a spear-shot come, short up they rein, and then
They break out with a mighty cry and spur the maddened steeds;
And all at once from every side the storm of spear-shot speeds,
As thick as very snowing is, and darkens down the sun.”
It would be hard to say which version is closer to the original. Conington leaves out the epithet celeres which Virgil bestows on the Latins, and also—a graver omission—that brother whom Virgil makes attend him like his shadow (et cum fratre Coras) in every battle-field of the Æneid. This fraternal warrior Morris gives us, indeed, but not very intelligibly, as Coras’ “brother-lord.” On the other hand, although Morris renders the Latin line for line, he is not so concise as Conington, who puts Virgil’s fifteen hexameters into twenty of his short lines as opposed to fifteen of Morris’ long ones. Virgil has nothing of Morris’ “iron harvest”; here—
“Tum late ferreus hastis
Horret ager, campique armis sublimibus ardent”—
we should give Conington the preference, while Morris excels in rendering the verse:
“Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum.”
In Morris’ version four words are to be specially noted: folk, dukes, maid, and very. They contain the key to his method, and we shall recur to them again.
Our American’s blank-verse here helps him to no greater degree of fidelity than either of his rivals, while even patriotism must own his version, as compared with theirs, a trifle tame:
“Meanwhile, the Trojan troops, the Etruscan chiefs,
And all the cavalry approach the walls,
In order ranged. The coursers leap and neigh
Along the fields, and fight against the curb,
And wheel about. An iron field of spears
Bristles afar, and lifted weapons blaze.
Upon the other side the Latins swift,
Messapus, Coras, and his brother come,
Also Camilla’s wing; in hostile ranks
They threaten with their lances backward drawn,
And shake their javelins. On the warriors press,
And fierce and fiercer neigh the battle steeds.
Advancing now within a javelin’s throw,
Each army halted; then, with sudden shouts,
They cheer and spur their fiery horses on.
From all sides now the spears fly thick and fast
As showers of sleet, and darken all the sky.”
The word “cavalry” here is too modern in its associations to suit us entirely, nor strikes us as highly poetical.
“Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry,”
is the way Campbell put it. Again, the rendering of the line Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum is less exact than Morris’, if not than Conington’s, and much less poetical than either; and were it not for the printer’s aid, we should be unable to tell such blank-verse as “Messapus, Coras, and his brother come, also Camilla’s wing,” from the very prosiest of prose. Mr. Cranch, like Prof. Conington, omits Camilla’s attribute of virginis—though that is, perhaps, better than to call her, as Dryden does, a “virago”—and turns Virgil’s snow into sleet, no doubt having in mind Gray’s
“Iron sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air,”
or the “sharp sleet of arrowy shower” in Paradise Regained.
It may be of interest to set side by side with these English translations the French version of Delille. It will show us, at least, where Mr. Morris went, perhaps, for his “iron harvest”:
“Mais déjà les Troyens, déjà les fiers Toscans
Pour attaquer vers Lausente ont déployé leurs rangs;
Ils marchent; le coursier de sa tête hautaine
Bat l’air, ronge le frein, et bondit dans la plaine;
Les champs sont hérissés d’une moisson de fer,
Et chaque javelot fait partir un éclair.
Et Messape, et Coras et son valeureux frère,
Et la chaste Camille et sa troupe légère,
Se présentent ensemble. On voit de toutes parts
Et s’alonger la lance et s’agiter les dards.
Sous les pas des guerriers les champs poudreux gémissent;
Et soldats et coursiers de colère frémissent.
Enfin, à la distance où le trait peut porter,
Les partis ennemis viennent de s’arrêter:
On s’écrie, on s’élance, et d’un essor rapide.
Chacun pousse en avant son coursier intrépide.
Plus pressés que la neige au retour des hivers
Des nuages de traits en obscurci les airs.”
In a future number we purpose concluding our present examination and taking a final leave of the translators.