“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child,
Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”
The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of
“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony”
in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. Suckling’s Session of the Poets, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.[[80]]
It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the Solvitur acris hiems (Carm. i. iv.):
“Now Venus loves to group
Her merry troop
Of maidens,