“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,”
is more expressive than it would be if couched in Latin words, would not the fine thought that
“Nice customs courtesy to kings,”
be greatly injured by substituting any other words for “nice” and “courtesy”? Because Shakespeare’s “oak-cleaving thunderbolts” is so admirable, shall we fail to appreciate Milton’s “fulmined over Greece,” where the idea of flash and reverberation is conveyed, without that of riving and shattering? It has been observed that Wordsworth’s famous ode, “Intimations of Immortality,” translated into “Hints of Deathlessness,” would hiss like an angry gander. Instead of Shakespeare’s
“Age cannot wither her.
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,”
say “her boundless manifoldness,” and would not the sentiment suffer in exact proportion with the music? With what terms equally expressive would you supply the place of such words as the long ones blended with the short in the exclamation of the horror-stricken Macbeth?—
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No! this my hand will rather
The multitudinous sea incarnadine,