“Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace,”
hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically. Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word vacuam we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, estranging sea” for the very best version we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “oceano dissociabili.”
This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as “fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness lacking in that of Milton’s:
“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume
Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade,
Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom
Your yellow hair you braid.
“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he
Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change,