Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/136

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS and loftiest flights, by a recurrence to the refrain, to prepare the listener for another rapture. In the monotonous interludes, which always introduce the same personage in the same language, there is a just scorn of varying light mechanic matters when a noble subject is in hand.

The Olympian hierarchy will not forgive Mr. Bryant for converting their high-sounding names into Latin equivalents. In fact, that characteristic of his style which most unfits it for translation of the Greek is its Latinism. It was impossible for the Romans to catch and reproduce the Hellenic spirit. We have no sympathy with the cant which deprecates the use of those Latin words by which our language is most enriched; but it is a fact that the Greek is best expressed by authors who rely chiefly on the Saxon, and that there is a singular harmony between the effects of the Greek and Saxon verse. To conclude: Homer will never receive an adequate translation; but the method which indicates itself as the nearest means thereto, is that of the aforesaid pure-Heroic blank-verse. The latter is full of Saxon strength, adapting itself to the sonorous refrain, and constructed in that epic order of words which is as natural to one century as to another. Probably the "Morte d' Arthur" of Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold's "Balder Dead," are the best specimens of this method in our language.

With Spanish poetry Mr. Bryant is entirely successful. His verse renders the grave Roman feeling of the Castilian muse to our outer and inner senses. Every reader will be repaid by a study of that [122]