LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 325 



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 

 reproduction, 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 de- 

 ceives the fancy. Of all English poets, Keats was the 

 one to have translated Homer. 



In 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 impression 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, vigor, and origi- 

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

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

 infallibly beget in us 1 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 he 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 



