She said, and melting as in tears she lay,
In a soft silver stream dissolved away.
The silver stream her virgin coldness keeps,
For ever murmurs, and for ever weeps;
Still bears the name the hapless virgin bore,
And bathes the forest where she rang’d before.
Pope’s Windsor Forest.
But a great deal of the beauty of every regular poem, consists in the melody of its numbers. Sensible of this truth, many of the prose translators of poetry, have attempted to give a sort of measure to their prose, which removes it from the nature of ordinary language. If this measure is uniform, and its return regular, the composition is no longer prose, but blank-verse. If it is not uniform, and does not regularly return upon the ear, the composition will be more unharmonious, than if the measure had been entirely neglected. Of this, Mr. Macpherson’s translation of the Iliad is a strong example.
But it is not only by the measure that poetry is distinguishable from prose. It is by the character of its thoughts and sentiments, and by the nature of that language in which they are clothed.[45] A boldness of figures, a luxuriancy of imagery, a frequent use of metaphors, a quickness of transition, a liberty of digressing; all these are not only allowable in poetry, but to many species of it, essential. But they are quite unsuitable to the character of prose. When seen in a prose translation, they appear preposterous and out of place, because they are never found in an original prose composition.
In opposition to these remarks, it may be urged, that there are examples of poems originally composed in prose, as Fenelon’s Telemachus. But to this we answer, that Fenelon, in composing his Telemachus, has judiciously adopted nothing more of the characteristics of poetry than what might safely be given to a prose composition. His good taste prescribed to him certain limits, which he was under no necessity of transgressing. But a translator is not left to a similar freedom of judgement: he must follow the footsteps of his original. Fenelon’s Epic Poem is of a very different character from the Iliad, the Æneid, or the Gierusalemme Liberata. The French author has, in the conduct of his fable, seldom transgressed the bounds of historic probability; he has sparingly indulged himself in the use of the Epic machinery; and there is a chastity and sobriety even in his language, very different from the glowing enthusiasm that characterises the diction of the poems we have mentioned: We find nothing in the Telemaque of the Os magna sonaturum.