Can ne’er invade; thy streams the labor’d ox
Refresh with cooling draughts
And glad the wand’ring herds.
Thy name shall shine, with endless honors graced,
While in my shell I sing the nodding oak
That o’er thy cavern deep
Waves his embowering head.”
It would almost seem as if the author of this version had taken pains to rub out every Horatian characteristic. The pretty touch of the loquaces lymphæ is thus omitted, unless the first line be meant to do duty for it, while by such padding as “chosen victim” and “endless honors” Horace’s sixteen lines are diluted into twenty—a danger to which the unrhymed translator, constantly seeking by inversions and paraphrases to cover the baldness of his medium, is peculiarly liable. Whatever may be said to the contrary, rhyme compels conciseness, and helps to point quite as often as it entices to expansion. Prof. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Warton’s, but rhymed in alternate lines, will be found greatly superior to it, and is perhaps, on the whole, the best we have seen—better even than Mr. Martin’s, who cannot get his Latin into less than twenty-four octosyllabic lines. Instead of giving either, let us see if all that is essential in Horace cannot be given in the same number of lines of what is known as the Tennysonian stanza, which is somewhat less capacious than the Alcaics of the original, though, by a certain pensive grace, peculiarly fitted to render the sentiment of this delightful ode:
“Blandusian fount, as crystal clear,
Of garlands worthy and of wine,