Page:Prometheus bound - Browning (1833).djvu/24

xx with less of coldness and more of rapture, the Homer of dramatic poetry.

With regard to the execution of this attempt, it is not necessary for me to say many words. 1 have rendered the iambics into blank verse, their nearest parallel; and the choral odes and other lyric intermixtures, into English lyrics, irregular and rhymed. Irregularity I imagined to be indispensable to the conveyance of any part of the effect of the original measure, of which little seems to be understood by modern critics, than that it is irregular. To the literal sense I have endeavoured to bend myself as closely as was poetically possible: but if, after all,—and it is too surely the case,—"quantum mutatus!" must be applied; may the reader say so rather sorrowfully than severely, and forgive my English for not being Greek, and myself for not being Æschylus.