To translate in this manner is beyond all doubt to deserve the name of poet.
We may go still farther and claim for Horace that he has been a dynamic power in the art of translation, not only as it concerned his own poems, but in its concern of translation as a universal art. No other poet presents such difficulties; no other poet has left behind him so long a train of disappointed aspirants. "Horace remains forever the type of the untranslatable," says Frederic Harrison. Milton attempts the Pyrrha ode in unrhymed meter, and the light and bantering spirit of Horace disappears. Milton is correct, polished, restrained, and pure, but heavy and cold. An exquisite jeu d'esprit has been crushed to death:
What slender youth, bedew'd with liquid odours,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind'st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changèd gods complain, and seas
Rough with black winds and storms
Unwonted shall admire!