Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/146

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS a forcible argument in defence of the author's retention of those Roman names by which the deities of Grecian mythology have been popularly known. Mr. Bryant's decision is in keeping with the habit of his mind, and highly authoritative, yet we trust that our regret that it should have been thus given does not savor of pedantry. We suspect that book-lovers, of the rising generation, are more familiar than he conceives them to be with the Hellenic proper names. They could not well be otherwise, reading Grote, Tennyson, and the Brownings, not to include Swinburne and the younger host of poets at home and abroad. And if Lord Derby in England, and Mr. Bryant in America, had adopted that nomenclature which, after all, is the only truthful one, the transition would have been complete, and the existing confusion brought to a conclusive end.

We have paid homage to the excellence of this translation, and briefly endeavored to show in what its power and beauty consist. It seems eminently proper that its author should have adopted blank-verse as the measure for his use. The English reader is wonted to this verse as the metre for a sustained epic poem. Probably in no other, at this stage of our poetic art, can the text of Homer be so faithfully rendered and his manner so nearly reached. It is the one, above all others, in which Mr. Bryant, its born master, was sure to achieve success. Finally, no blank-verse translation, at all commensurate with the limits of this stately measure, has hitherto been given us. There was a void which needed filling, but it [132]