Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/252

 reader of poetry in him is, like the governor, fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own language. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning; but they make out a meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand; and the words, heard over and over again, come to convey this meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate, though not philologically. How many have attached a clear and poetically adequate sense to the beam and 'the mote', though not precisely the right one! How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from Milton's words, 'grate on their scrannel pipes', who yet might have been puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel for the dictionary! So we get a clear sense from ἀδιvὸs as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even though that all be philologically insufficient; so we get a clear sense from εἰλίποδες as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the words, not his philological uncertainties about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words like bragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words; because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them poetically.

Perplexed by his knowledge of the philo