ηλεγες ητορ εχων, ἁλιπορφυρος ειαρος ορνις,—
but in translating it makes a truly extraordinary blunder.
"Would I were the kingfisher, as he flies, with his mates in his feeble age, between wind and water."
νηλεγες ητορ meaning, as we need hardly say, "reckless heart"; it is exactly Byron's, "With all her reckless birds upon the wing." In the quotations from Sappho, Ibycus, and Pindar, Mr. Palgrave has been judicious and happy, but surely he ought to have found place for the lovely flower cradle of Iamus in the sixth Olympic Ode, and for the moonlight evening in the third Olympian,—only seven words, but what a picture!—while, in the popular poetry, the omission of the Swallow Song is inexplicable.[32] Nor can we forgive him the omission of the magnificent simile of the spring wind clearing away the clouds, in the thirteenth of the fragments attributed to Solon.
But it is in dealing with the Greek dramatists that Mr. Palgrave is most defective in illustration. It is not to the opening of the Prometheus, or to the conclusion, or, indeed, to any of the passages from this poet which Mr. Palgrave cites, that we must turn for Æschylean landscape, or for illustration of this poet's power of natural description. It is to his brief picture—his pictures of scenery, though singularly vivid, are always brief—of the airy seat "against which the watery clouds drift into snow,"
λισσας αιγιλιψ απροσδεικτος οιοφρων κρεμας
γυπιας πετρα (Supplices, 772-3),
where almost every word is a perfect picture, literally beggaring mere translation; it is to his description, so magical in its rhythm, of the mid-day sea slumbering in summer calm (Agamemnon, 548-50),
η θαλπος, ευτε ποντος εν μεσημβριναις
κοιταις ακυμων νηνεμοις ευδοι πεσων,