Let me give one or two samples from Worsley’s translation of the Odyssey, which I am disposed to think is the best poetic translation of any classical poet that we have in English. Mr. Worsley rendered the hexameters of Homer into the Spenserian stanza, and he so perfectly caught the whole rhythm and cadence of Spenser, and this answers so well to the spirit of the Odyssey, the most romantic of Greek poems, that I know no more delightful reading than those picturesque and melodious stanzas.
Here is one sample. Ulysses, having left Calypso’s island on a raft, is shipwrecked in mid-seas, and this is the description of his coming to land on the island of Phæacia:—
“Two nights and days in the tumultuous swell
He wandered. Often did his heart forebode
Utter extinction in the yawning hell,
But when the fair-haired Dawn arising glowed,
And in the eastern heaven the thin light showed,
Came a calm-deepening day, windless and clear.
Then when Odysseus on a tall wave rode,
And his keen eyes along the heaving mere