uttering of base coin, words not of the appear to us the most elegant and pleas better age; to say nothing of small lar-ing; and we cannot but assign the place cenies and petty thefts; the stripping of honour to the accomplished prelate other people's children of their fine and whom we have already named. There well-fitting clothes, and dressing them in are two short pieces of Dr. Butler's, with mean and unseemly rags-inadequate the exception of one word, excellent, versions of beautiful originals; the ab- combining the ease of original composi duction of rich and elegant epithets, and tion with close faithfulness of translamarrying them to worthless and unsuita- tion. Perhaps some of our readers may ble substantives; with sundry instances never have happened to meet with the of contempt of court, in introducing un- original of the first, which strikes us as seasonable and indifferent jokes. well deserving preservation. It is by a., i. e, Dr. David Moir of Musselburgh: We must begin, however, by pointing out some of those copies of verses which MOUNT ST. BERNARD. 'Where these rude rocks on Bernard's summit Hæc ubi saxa vides Bernardi in monte, viator, nod, Pennini quondam templa fuere Jovis, Once heavenward sprung the throne of Pen- Hospitium vetus, et multis memorabile sæclis, nine Jove, An ancient shrine of hospitable Love, Now burns the altar to the Christians' God. Here peaceful Piety, age on age, has trod The waste; still keeps her vigils, takes her Still as of yore salutes the coming guest, Speed the rich cordial to his ebbing heart; Chafe his stiff limbs, and bid him not to die. So tasked to smoothe stern winter's drifting wing, And garb the eternal snows in more eternal spring.' Nunc colitur veri sanctior ara Dei. The word medela, we apprehend, is not used by any writer of the better ages. The second is from Coleridge's pretty epigram, ascribed, we know not why, to Donne: 'Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.' We shall find presently some of the cleverest of the comic verses bearing the same signature. 'Ante malum quam te culpâ maculaverat, ante fanciful tone of Mr. Tennyson's poem, and quietly dropped its affectations. He has not, perhaps, quite subdued it to classical Of the younger candidates for honour, purity: it still reads considerably below we cannot but distinguish Lord Lyttleton. the Virgilian age. We must be consider. Of his compositions we should perhaps ed, indeed, as quoting Lord Lyttleton, prefer that from the 'Deserted Village' to not Mr. Tennyson, who, however, might the one which we select; we quote this, study with advantage how much his lan however, for the sake of variety, an ex-guage must be filtered, and its exuberance ample of hexameter verse. The transla- strained off, before it can be transfused tor has caught very happily the wild and into classical verse :— "Welcome, Apollo; welcome home, Apollo: Apollo, my Apollo, loved Apollo." 'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. He, mildly smiling, in his milk-white palm Close held a golden apple, lightning bright With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of heaven, Ambrosially smelling. From his lip Ida, meam, genitrix, mors advenit, accipe vocem. Aurea per montes roseo fulgore superbos Ridebat veniens Aurora; ego sola sedebam, Triste tuens; illum mox albo pectore, ut astrum Dissipat obscuras adverså fronte tenebras, auras. Tunc ego, "Mi tandem salve mihi, dulcis Apollo, Exoptate diu, salve mihi, dulcis Apollo!" 'Ida, meam, genitrix, mors advenit, accipe vo cem. Ille mihi flavum, quem lactea dextra tenebat, Curved crimson, the full-flowing river of speech, Protinus e roseo manantia verba labello 'My own Enone, This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand Cor pepulere meum: - Speciosam candida frontem, Enone, mea vita, hujusne in cortice mali Inscriptum, "Capiat quæ sit pulcherrima" cernis? Hoc gravis a pomo surget cœlestibus ira; Adveniet, liquidæ mirâ dulcedine formæ, English poetry, rendered, in our opinion, with peculiar grace and neatness: 'LAVINIA ET CHLOE. Trans mare mercator falso sub nomine currit, Ut vehat intactas dissimulator opes; Non male perjuram decorat Lavinia musam, At mihi lux vera est, veraque flamma, Chloe. 'Molle meum in thalamo cultæ Lavinia mensæ, Addiderat carmen dulcisonamque lyram; Quum me blanda Chloe, quod erat, cantare rogavit, Et non indoctâ verrere fila manu. 'Solicito chordas, vocemque e pectore mitto; Sed gemitus inter carmina triste sonant; Dumque audit falsam de se Lavinia laudem, Totus adorato figor in ore Chloes. Erubuit formosa Chloe; Lavinia frontem Contraxit; cecini contremuique simul; Et Venus ipsa suo ridens clamavit Amori,En tria facundis prodita corda genis!' "He would not hear my voice, fair child; He may not come to thee; The face, that once, like spring-time smiled, On earth no more thou'lt see. A flower's brief bright life of joy, And has he left the birds and flowers, And through the long, long summer hours, And by the brook, and in the glade, O while my brother with me played, Would I had loved him more."-HEMANS. In the third stanza, we would suggest 'quos sevimus una,' as preserving a thought which should not be lost. We must not omit a specimen of the 'FIDELE'S GRAVE. 'With fairest flowers Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, I'll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor The azure harebell, like thy veins; no, nor With charitable bill (O bill, sore shaming none To winter-ground thy corse.' Since the days when the author of the Pursuits of Literature brandished his satiric rod over the 'seventh form boys,' who had ventured to translate Gray's Elegy into Greek, the same passion seems always to have prevailed, and still prevails, of accomplishing this, in either language we are persuaded, hopeless task. Besides an attempt to render this poem into Latin elegiacs, in Mr. Drury's volume, we have before us another recently printed by the Rev. William Hildyard. How many more have passed before us, and flitted into the shades of oblivion, we do not pretend to recollect. We cannot congratulate either of our present translators on their sucsess; but we are disposed to examine the general causes of failure in all who have made the attempt, rather than to assume the ungracious office of pointing out the defects (except so far as to illustrate our views) of these two recent productions. It seems to us that it is not merely the “Heu! non audiret matrem, formose, vocantem, "Sole sub aprico quid si breve carpserit ævum? Splendida decidui tempora floris habet. I puer! et ludos tecum meditare novellos, Ergo abit, et volucres et gemmea prata reliquit ? Nec rursum in viridi reduces errabimus umbrâ? present Provost of Eton, whom, to say the truth, we like much better in his serious than his playful mood. 'FIDELES TUMULUS. Tuum, Fidele, floribus pulcherrimis, Dum durat æstas, incolamque me vident Hæc rura, funus contegam; pallentium Tui instar oris, primularum copia Haud deerit, aut colore venas æmulans Hyacinthus, aut odora frons cynosbati: Quæ, nec calumniamur, haud erat tuo Odora quamvis, spiritu fragrantior. Tibi hæc vetustæ more mansuetudinis (O mos pudori prodigis hæredibus Inhumata patrum qui relinquunt corpora !) Rubecularum vilis hospitalitas Afferret: imo plura: namque mortuis His omnibus, cubile musco sterneret, Brumaque te curaret, ut viresceres.' exquisite beauty of the original, but the peculiar cast of its beauty, which defies translation, especially into a dead language. Where the excellence of a poem consists entirely in the grandeur, boldness, or grace of the thoughts, those thoughts may find an adequate expression in another tongue; and beautiful images may be represented by beautiful images, if not precisely the same, yet with a close analogy: even peculiar forms of language, though more rarely, may be rendered, if not by equivalent, yet by what we may call kindred or congenial terms-familiar, by familiar, refined by refined, and even recondite phrases by phrases equally remote from ordinary use. But where the beauty consists in the perfect balance and harmony between the thought and the language, and where the versification is in keeping with the same general expression; where there is at once consummate art and perfect ease; every hue of language in words, contrive to produce no lasting effect, either leading us through a succession of thonghts and images pleasing enough in themselves, but without coherence, mu tual dependence, or harmony-or bewil dering us in rich and sparkling language, in which we idle away a short time agreeably enough, but of which nothing whatever adheres to the memory. The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, its proper gradation, every word in its who with abundant fertility of imagery, proper place; where all the thoughts, liveliness of conception, and often great words, and numbers are, as it were, tones command of picturesque and musical in the general harmony-then it is that the slightest transposition mars the effect; the slightest substitution forces an invidious comparison: the least omission makes a void, and a superfluous word is felt as a clog and a burthen. Even if the copy could be perfectly like, with no feature lost, no lineament misplaced, we de mand the life, the expression of the original. But perfect fidelity is indeed al- For the same reason Gray's 'Elegy,' most impossible, from the different idiom like the prose of Plato-and if we did not of the languages, the closer or more dif- remember the versions of Lady Dacre, we fuse forms of speech, the different length should have added the poetry of Petrarch of the correspondent verses; we always is untranslateable. This will appear have too much or too little; the version from the comparison of a few stanzas of is in one place inadequate, in another these versions, selected with no disrespect spun out beyond the proper extent. to the attainments of the authors-(the What is the unspeakable charm of this writer in the 'Arundines,' the Rev. I. H. 'Elegy,' which has fixed it in the me- Macaulay, is occasionally very neat and mory of every lover, we may almost say scholarlike)-but under the conviction every reader, of poetry, since its first that this comparison will illustrate our publication, and even forced reluctant ad- meaning. Take the first stanza: miration from the surly critic, who partly The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, from prejudice against the man, partly from mental temperament which could not appreciate its peculiar excellence, trod rough-shod over the rest of Gray's poetry? There is nothing very profound or origi nal in the thoughts; they are those which might occur under such circumstances to minds of but ordinary strength or culti-Depositi sonat exequias campana diei, Incedit lentum per vaga rura pecus; vation the language, though sometimes Carpit iter, repetitque domum defessus arator, wrought out with unsurpassed felicity, is Sublustrique moror vespere solus agris.' more simple and equable than is usual with Gray the scenery is quiet and doWhat sense the translator would give to mestic, neither strikingly picturesque nor the word 'depositi' we are at a loss to guess, romantic; the imagery is pleasing, but but in no way can it represent parting day." neither very bold, nor at all luxuriant; In the second line we lose the 'lowing' even the moral tone has nothing of that herd; and with submission, the transference religious depth and earnestness, which of the wandering, or winding of the herd to some might think inseparable from the the country (vaga rura), is very like nonsubject. It is, we are persuaded, this sense. How flat for plods his weary way,' wonderful harmony and correspondence the double phrase carpit iter, repetitque of thought, imagery, language, and domum;' and though the fourth line is corverse; the exquisite finish, which betrays rect enough, yet how inadequate to the quiet nothing of elaborate or toilsome artifice, melancholy of the original. Mr. Hildyard but which seems to have been cast at is not more fortunate; not one line gives once in the mind of the poet; everything half the slight but happy touches of the poet; in his creation seems to have taken spon- the last adds an image, and that a false one: taneously its proper place; nothing is Audin' ut occiduæ sonitum campana diei otiose or unnecessary, yet nothing ob- Reddit, et a pratis incipit ire pecus; trusive or insubordinate; the language Jam proprios petit ipse lares defessus arator, though perspicuous is suggestive, though suggestive neither vague nor diverting the imagination into a different train of thought; it is a study, in short, of composition, which might be of the greatest use to the young poets of the present day, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.' Here is the version in the Arundines Cami:' Et passim, extinctis ignibus, omne silet.' The knell of day, the winding and lowing herd, the slow step of the ploughman, the poet himself, all are gone; and the fire is put out exactly when Molly is putting on her kettle : : |