The Translations from Euripides, Calderon, and Goethe in this Volume, will give great pleasure to the scholar and to the general reader. They are executed with equal fidelity and spirit. If the present publication contained only the two last pieces in it, the Prologue in Heaven, and the May-day Night of the Faust (the first of which Lord Leveson Gower has omitted, and the last abridged, in his very meritorious translation of that Poem), the intellectual world would receive it with an All Hail! We shall enrich our pages with a part of the May-day Night, which the Noble Poet has deemed untranslateable.
‘Chorus of Witches. The stubble is yellow, the corn is green,
Now to the brocken the witches go;
The mighty multitude here may be seen
Gathering, witch and wizard, below.
Sir Urean is sitting aloft in the air;
Hey over stock; and hey over stone!
’Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done?
Tell it who dare! tell it who dare!
A Voice. Upon a snow-swine, whose farrows were nine,