In addition to the works named above, there are several collections of short poems and selections of poetry invaluable to the student. They are “infinite riches in little room.” I name—
Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song.
Emerson’s Parnassus.
Ward’s English Poets.
Piatt’s American Poetry and Art.
Appleton’s Library of British Poetry.
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
“A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain,” says Lord Macaulay, “has been translated into our own tongue. I would not dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe; but I would console those who have not time to make themselves linguists by assuring them that, by means of their own mother tongue, they may obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of the age of Charles the Fifth, to treasures surpassing those which were possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melanchthon.”
I name some of the treasures which you may thus acquire—
Homer’s Iliad. Of this work, without which no scholar’s library is complete, many translations have been made. The most notable are George Chapman’s (1611), Pope’s (1715), Tickell’s (1715), Cowper’s (1781), Lord Derby’s (1867), Bryant’s (1870). Americans will, of course, prefer Bryant’s translation; but Derby’s is more poetical, and the greatest scholars award the palm of merit to Chapman. Says Lowell: “Chapman has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer.”
Æschylus. “Prometheus Bound” has been rendered into English verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Agamemnon” has been translated by Dean Milman, and the entire seven tragedies by Dean Potter. “The ‘Prometheus’ is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda.”—Emerson.
Aristophanes. The translation by John Hookham Frere is admirable. “We might apply to the pieces of Aristophanes the motto of a pleasant and acute adventurer in Goethe: ‘Mad, but clever.’”—A. W. Schlegel.
Virgil’s Æneid. The best known translations of Virgil are Dryden’s (1697), Christopher Pitt’s (1740), John Conington’s (1870), William Morris’s (1876). Your choice among these will lie between the last two. “Virgil is far below Homer; yet Virgil has genius enough to be two men.”—Lord Lytton.
Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Satires. There are excellent translations by Conington, Lord Lytton, and T. Martin. “There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, ... but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura.”—Ibid.
Dante’s Divina Commedia. Translated by Longfellow. “The finest narrative poem of modern times.”—Macaulay.
Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Bayard Taylor. “What constitutes Goethe’s glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did produce an epic poem—I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and speak.”—H. A. Taine.