LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 239 



free reproduction. At best, the translation of poetry is but an 

 imitation of natural flowers in cambric or wax; and however 

 much of likeness there may be, the aroma, whose charm of in 

 definable suggestion in the association of ideas is so powerful, 

 is precisely what is lost irretrievably. From where it lurked 

 in the immortal verse, a presence divined rather than ascertained, 

 baffling the ear which it enchanted, escaping the grasp which 

 yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent, imperishable, beckoning the 

 imagination with promises better than any fulfilment, 



The parting genius is with sighing sent. 



The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn ; the repro 

 duction, if by a man of genius, is like Keats s ode, which makes 

 the figures move and the leaves tremble again, if not with the 

 old life, with a sorcery which deceives the fancy. Of all English 

 poets, Keats was the one to have translated Homer. 



If any other than a mere prose version of a great poem, we 

 have a right to demand that it give us at least an adequate im 

 pression of force and originality. We have a right to ask, If 

 this poem were published now for the first time, as the work 

 of a contemporary, should we read it, not with the same, but 

 with anything like the same conviction of its freshness, vigour, 

 and originality, its high level of style, and its witchery of verse, 

 that Homer, if now for the first time discovered, would infallibly 

 beget in us ? Perhaps this looks like asking for a new Homer 

 to translate the old one ; but if this be too much, it is certainly 

 not unfair to insist that the feeling given us should be that of 

 life, and not artifice. 



The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all 

 English versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is 

 most successful, thoroughly alive. He has made for us the best 

 poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in so far 

 gives us a truer idea of him. Of all translators lie is farthest 

 removed from the fault with which he charges others, when he 

 says that our divine master s most ingenious imitating the life 

 of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never respected nor per 

 ceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically on the 

 grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of 

 him. His mastery of English is something wonderful even in 

 an age of masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, 

 and not a contrivance of pedants and grammarians. He had a 

 reverential sense of our divine Homer s depth and gravity, 

 which will not open itself to the curious austerity of belabouring 

 art, but only to the natural and most ingenious soul of our thrice- 



