“Thou seekest counsel, gracious sovereign,
In matters which to none of us are dark
Nor needing our voices. All must own
They know what best concerns the public good,
Yet hesitate to speak.”
Indeed, we must confess that we are at a loss to know what Mr. Cranch means by saying: “I am far from pretending that my versification may not frequently fail to convey the movement of the Latin lines to the ear of those to whom they are familiar.” If he means that his versification often, or even sometimes, or at all, conveys the movement of the Latin lines to his own ear, then his ear must be as curiously constructed as the “arrected ears” he bestows on Æneas in the famous shepherd simile in the second book.[[3]]
But it is ungracious to linger on faults which we have only dwelt on because they seemed to flow from what we must take to be a misconception on the part of Mr. Cranch of the true spirit of his author. His version has certainly the merit of fidelity to the sense of the original, though this, it seems to us, is sometimes bought by a sacrifice of the spirit. His verse is, for the most part, what he claims it to be, smooth, flowing, and compact, though it does not recall to us, as to him, the best models of blank-verse, and he does not sin, as one other of our translators does, against that “supreme elegance” which is Virgil’s chief fascination. We find him best in the least essentially poetic passages, which is, perhaps, not so bad a sign as it appears. The speech of Juno in the tenth book is no unfavorable specimen of his best style:
“... Then, stung with rage,
The royal Juno spake: ‘Wherefore dost thou
Force me to break my silence deep, and thus