High o’er the steepy crags, in airy distance hung.”
“What do you think of that for poetry?” I asked Ruth, and she replied that she did not wonder it was not given to school-boys to study.
“Whose is the translation?” she asked.
“Sir Charles Abraham Elton. But is it fair to melt up a golden, or even a brazen wine-cup and then recast it in an entirely different form and call it a piece of Roman antiquity? That is what these stiff and formal so-called heroic pentameters do with the flowing hexameters of the original.”
“I should like to go to the Saint-Bernard,” I remarked.
“It can be easily arranged,” said my nephew and, as usual, in answer to my wishes came the realization. Instead of describing my own not especially eventful visit to the hospice,—though I could write a rhapsody about the noble dogs, one of whom had only a short time before made a notable rescue of a young American who had wandered off by himself, got lost and nearly perished,—I will give Rogers’s vivid poetic picture. The poet, in his deliberate blank verse, thus pays his respects to the monks:—
“Night was again descending, when my mule,
That all day long had climbed among the clouds,
Higher and higher still, as by a stair