My dear Sir,—Do people in general, upon this side of the great water, read Homer? Virgil, I know, in some parts of the Union, is a lady’s book; nor is there, I think, any ancient author that better deserves the honour. But the man’s book, Homer? It is not every boy that learns Greek; and not all who learn Greek read through the whole forty-eight books of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ Is Pope much studied? I should fancy not: and, indeed, though one is glad to hear any one say that he has, in the past tense, read that ingenious composition, it is not easy to bid any one, in the future, go and read it. And, if not Pope, whom can we recommend? Chapman is barbarous, dissonant, obsolete, incorrect. In Hobbes there are two good lines, well known, but they cannot be repeated too often—
And like a star upon her bosom, lay
His beautiful and shining golden head.
(They are of Astyanax in the arms of his mother; and how that first of English prosaists was inspired with them remains a problem to all generations.) Cowper, who could read, however much enjoined to it? In short there neither is, nor has been, nor in all probability ever will be, anything like a translation. And the whole Anglo-Saxon world of the future will, it is greatly to be feared, go forth upon its way, clearing forests, building clippers, weaving calicoes, and annexing Mexicos, accomplishing its natural manifest destiny, and subsiding into its primitive aboriginal ignorance. Accomplishing our manifest destiny! to be, that is, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ to the human race in general; and then, peradventure, when the wood has all been hewn, and the water drawn, to cease to exist, to be effaced from the earth we have subdued—
Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thine earthly task hast done,
Homeward gone, and ta’en thy wages.
To cease to exist, to vanish, to give place, in short, to some nobler kind of men, in whose melodious and flexible form of speech the old Homer will have a chance of reappearing unimpaired, or possibly some new Homer singing the wrath of another Achilles and the wanderings of a wiser Ulysses.
Fiat voluntas! Let us go forward to our manifest destiny with content, or at least resignation, and bravely fill up the trench, which our nobler successors may thus be able to pass.