Page:The Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri vol i.djvu/19

Rh champagne, like looking on the moving forms of a complicated dance withont hearing* the music which guides and regulates them. Bead a chorus of Sophocles or an ode of Pindar in a "crib," and see what you think of it.

With these convictions, then, and yielding, as I had done before in another region, to the translating impulse, I entered on the task in the hope that I should find the difficulty of reproducing the triple rhyme of the Commedia, without unduly sacrificing faithfulness, not altogether insuperable. I was ignorant at the time that I had three predecessors, in C. B. Cayley (1851), Mra Ramsay (1862), and the Rev. C. Dayman (1865), who had thus translated the whole of the Commedia, while portions had been rendered in the same form by Mr. Hayley, Lord Byron, O. Volpi (1836), Thomas Brooksbank (1854), and Bev. J. W. Thomas (1859). It was, I think, in 1867 that I showed the first fruits of my labours to some competent Italian scholars, Edoardo Fusco, Antonio Biaggi, and John Hullah, and what they said encouraged me to persevere. And so, as more than twenty years passed on, interrupted often by long intervals, during which my time was occupied with other labours, the work has grown to completeness. I do not regret those interruptions, partly because at the end of each interval I came back to my work with a certain freshness which enabled me to criticise it more or less from the position of an outsider; partly because the labours themselves which had seemed hindrances I found to be really helps, and I learned that in writing comments on Isaiah and Jeremiah I had been training myself to enter more fully into the mind and heart of Dante; that the study of the eschatology of the early and mediaeval Church was