Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/418

354 would add a sickly page of homilies. Even the genius of Wordsworth could not redeem him from the curse of morality. You remember his Leech-gatherer? Had we to choose between The Leech-gatherer and the fisherman, we should choose the earlier story, with regret, perhaps, but we should choose it. Wordsworth we read in his own metre; Theocritus we read in a translation in which much must be lost; yet how much remains in the most beautiful translation ever made! You were saying?


 * Yes; I think he writes verse better than prose, occasionally somewhat awkwardly; but in both, in verse and prose,