variance with the more modern rhythm. Indeed, it is a question whether in this respect the more modern rhythm is as foreign to the Greek as it is to the Middle German. But if that liberty be denied, the measure loses something of its essence, and the metre of the thus modernized Middle German with its heavy cesural pause answers well enough for the rhyming ballad, as in some of Macaulay's lays, but any long descriptive epic poem in that metre would be very tiresome. It is explicable enough why the verse of fourteen syllables and the Alexandrine have been preferred in English, and we cannot agree with Mr. Lettsom, that to chop a poem of two thousand stanzas into short strophes of eight lines with three accents in each verse, will produce any more charming effect than to put the same amount of matter into stanzas of double length without a cesural pause so marked as to break each line into two. Something, indeed much, must always depend on the character of the poem, but it is not easy to conceive of a lengthy epic even in modern rhythm successfully made on the plan of the Niebulungen strophe. Why did not Mr. Lettsom think it expedient to preserve also in his translation the long fourth line of the stanza, if variety is the main end in a metre? Certainly those final lines of each strophe add variety to the measure, but it is a variety that mars the effect of the poem. We hold the same thing to be true of the division of the other lines, and that this old epic considered as a poem (whatever may be thought of it as a collection of songs) does not exhibit that perfect poetic form which the quality of much of its matter would lead us to expect, and that on this very ground he who put it into its present form was no master, no such marvellous fashioner as Walther von der Vogelweide, who was put forward by Von der Hagen as having given the last final shape to the poem.

But even if we were to concede something of rugged force and now and then a suggestion of the deep undertone of fate (so marked a characteristic of the ideas of the poem) to this metre, does it follow that the metre should be retained when translating from a language marked by inflectional ending into one where not merely inflectional endings have disappeared, but where verbs and adjectives though often from the same stems appear in much shorter forms? This question would

be best answered, probably, by taking account of the skill of the translator. A translator of the highest skill, a master of English form might make the strophe vital and organic in an English translation. Nevertheless there is almost as much difference in respect to inflection between the Middle German of the twelfth century and the English of the nineteenth as there is between the Latin of the first and the German of the nineteenth. If one, even a master of German form, endeavors to render the concise verse of the In Memoriam into German, it is found necessary now and then to sacrifice a valuable word. So, on the other hand, Mr. Lettsom, who is not a master of poetic form in English, carrying his devotion to the Niebelungen poem so far as to adopt the metre in his English has often to insert a patch-word to eke out the line.

Take chapter 34 of Lachmann's edition:

Gôte man dô zen êren eine messe sanc,

dô huop sich von den liuten vil michel gedranc,

dô si ze rîter wurden nåch ritterlicher ê

mit also grôzen êren daz wætlich nimmer mêre ergê.

The simple meaning of the strophe is as follows:

To God's honor one then sung a mass,

Then arose from the people very great press,

When they became knights by knightly usage,

With such great splendors as can never more easily be.

Mr. Lettsom's rendering is wordy, except in the last line, where it is inaccurate.

But first to God's due honor a holy mass they sung,
And then a press and struggle arose the crowd among,

And then with pomp befitting each youth was dubbed a knight,
In sooth before was never seen so fair a sight.

This is not an especially patched-out stanza, but it is clear enough from it that under the moulding of Mr. Lettsom the metre has to be filled out with padding. This is a grave objection to the use of the metre, if it be necessary to the rendering. For in the original most lines of the poem are strong and kernelly, if one may say so. But over and over in the translation the idea is given in a solution of synonyms and adjectives, so that the fresh, sharp presentation of the original is lost. It is not to be supposed that any translation of this old epic can

give its sensuous ideas, its portentous whispers of woe, the simple objective movement without some loss. But the use of this metre in the hands of one who is not a poet magnifies the loss, and doubtless the four trochees employed by Herder in rendering the Cid into German and by Longfellow in the Hiawatha legends, the Kalevala metre, would be a less awkward instrument for one who can lay no claim to poetic power. Under no constraint from the necessity of rhyme, and released from the pressure of filling a void left by inflections, the translator would not be compelled, as was Mr. Lettsom, to eke out the sense from an inexhaustible storehouse of thens, theres, sos, and by constant repetition. That in the hands of a master of language (we do not now say of poetic form), this metre may even in English have a vitality, and a vitality that seems mediæval will appear by contrasting two of Mr. Carlyle's strophes with two of Mr. Lettsom's. It must be premised that Mr. Carlyle's verses (published in his essay by way of giving some flavor from the poem) are much more literal than Mr. Lettsom's, and therefore more likely to preserve the spirit at the expense of the form. We take the opening strophes of the poem. First, Mr. Lettsom's:

In stories of our fathers, high marvels we are told
Of champions well approved in perils manifold;
Of feasts and merry meetings, of weeping and of wail,
And deeds of gallant daring I'll tell you in my tale.

In Burgundy there flourished a maid so fair to see,
That in all the world together a fairer could not be.

This maiden's name was Kriemhild; through her in dismal strife
Full many a prowest warrior thereafter lost his life.

Mr. Carlyle rendered as follows:

We find in ancient story wonders many told,

Of heroes in great glory with spirit free and bold;

Of joyances and hightides, of weeping and of woe,
Of noble archers striving mote ye now wonders know.
A right noble maiden did grow in Burgundy,
That in all lands of earth naught fairer mote there be;
Kriemhild of Worms she hight, she was a fairest wife,
For the which must warriors a many lose their life.

It will be admitted by any one who reads German, that Mr. Carlyle has given something in these strophes nearer the orig

inal both in spirit and form (Mr. Carlyle often omits the unaccented syllables) than Mr. Lettsom has attained. Mr. Lettsom seems indeed to have imitated in two regards Mr. Carlyle's translation. First, he bas adopted the same metre, and secondly he has employed archaic words. There is indeed in this translation a great number of obsolete and uncommon words, and it evinces considerable familiarity with Spenser and Shakespeare, as one must expect from the fact that Mr. Lettsom's studies have been chiefly in early English. Such words as make, Spenserian for mate, drear as a substantive, heady, meiny for retinue, selle for a saddle, leman, are a few of Mr. Lettsom's favorite archaisms. But the employment of such words more frequently would not give any genuine mediæval flavor to the translation. They are disjecta membra, as the spirit of the original is lost in verbosity. It may be true, as seems to be presupposed by the use of such words, that most readers of a translation of this poem would be students of literature and therefore understand the words of Spenser and Shakespeare, as they occur. But to one who knows them these vocables are in strange contrast to the general vapidity and diffuseness of Mr. Lettsom's verses; more exactly, it serves to heighten the impression of these qualities to find these old words, so vital in their original belongings, thrown in to give a seasoning of antiquity and vigor to the "devitalized" reproductions of our translator. The apparent thing is that Mr. Lettsom has no poetic feeling, and the slavish adherence to the metre, the retention of its heavy cesural form, and the devotion to the rhyme make this want of poetic perception very conspicuous. Much of the life of the poem is sacrificed. That much of its essence has been unnecessarily lost, becomes, we think, clear from the comparison of the corresponding verses of this translation with those contained in Mr. Carlyle's essay. But a comparison of some of Mr. Lettsom's verses with the original will make it further clear that in blindly following the modernized version of Dr. Braunfels he has missed in some fine points the meaning of the old poem. Lettsom's strophe, 1054, is as follows. ("Each a chosen man," the last words of 1053, are the subject of the verb in the first line of 1054.)—

Led by the shrieks of horror ran with like eager speed,
Some of the househould fancied they came for funeral weed.
Well might they be confounded, and from their senses start,
The sting of deadly sorrow was deep in every heart.

The first line of the original "where they heard the women so fearfully lamenting," is translated with tolerable accuracy, "led by the shrieks of horror;" but the words "ran with like eager speed" have no counterpart in the original; the German is simply kômen, go. They however went from bed and without putting on their day apparel. Line second is in the original, "then some of them thought," or "it occurred to some of them that they ought to have clothes on." This refers to the heroes themselves, to whom coming suddenly, overcome by the news, in night-clothes or undress, it first occurred after they arrived at the place where the women were bewailing Siegfried's death, that they were not suitably dressed to be in ladies' society. Mr. Lettsom translates, "some of the household fancied they came for funeral weed," following probably Dr. Braunfels, who followed an antiquated explanation by Lachmann. The true rendering is apparent when the third and fourth lines are taken as an excuse for the heroes' sudden bewilderment and failure to stop to dress on hearing the report of Siegfried's death.

Nothing is more marked in the Middle German literature, than the purely sensuous, concrete character, both of the language and the ideas. It ought to be one of the chief aims of a translator to preserve just this character, and by a faithful adherence to the concrete method of describing things, much more could be done for a genuine translation of the poem than by the reproduction of a peculiar metre or the insertion of obsolete vocables.

Mr. Lettsom translates stanza 947 of the Lachmann edition, as follows. It is the picture of the chamberlain discovering Siegfried laid dead at the door of Kriemhild's apartment.

He saw him blood-bespattered, with weed* all dabbled o'er;
He knew not 'twas his master stretched on the reeking floor;
In went he to the chamber; with him the light he took,
By which on such deep horror sad Kriemhild was to look.

* Used in the Spenserian sense of clothing.