had a discussion with a Frenchman over this one day. To stop our mouths he caught up a French journal, and thrust upon us this phrase, 'On m'a mis en dedans.' 'There,' said he, exultant, 'now find me your English equivalent.' They have let me in for it,' said we, without a moment's hesitation. So perished one untranslatable. M. Charles Hugo translated Shakespeare; he came to 'A plague o' both your houses!' He did not search for the French equivalent, but assumed its absence, and rendered the line thus : Que la petite vérole mange vos maisons toutes les deux.' Yet a well-known play of Molière ends with these words: 'Peste des gens!' 'A plague o' the folk!' Then what need had le petit Hugo to go cruising after the smallpox,' which was not known to Shakespeare!

English is a supple tongue; there are many pure exotics hard to English, but few impossible. Search the deep well, and ye shall find. Look at the New Testament, and then glance at that old wretch Rabelais. Yet our language in capable hands has reproduced them both to a T.

In the New Testament sometimes the Greek is finer, but sometimes the English; for example, in the first verse of St. Paul to the Hebrews, the thunder and the music are in the English verse, owing partly to the superiority of the grand monosyllable' God' to the weak dissyllable Osóc. English translations fail merely because the translator is not a master of English. People fancy that to English Greek you need only know Greek, and to English Latin, Latin. Stuff! the money-changer who changes notes into gold must, above all things, have much gold. Now Mr. Arnold is a master of English. He knows our monosyllables and their might. They are the finest infantry in the world, and he can march them. Now and then, as always must happen, the Greek original is superior; but quite as often the English version is superior. We rather prefer

to

καὶ δὴ λύχνον ἄπιστον ἀπέσβεσε πικρὸς ἀήτης,
καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ ἔρωτα πολυτλήτοιο Λεάνδρου,

The gust extinguished Hero's lamp; the sea
Hid young Leander and his agony.'

But the four previous lines, beginning

'Below, the monstrous buffets of the sea,'

To en

are both mightier and more pathetic than the original; and, indeed,
the ten verses from that commencement are granite lines.
able the English reader the better to appreciate them, here is the
translation printed in Anderson's Collection of British Poets:

From wave to wave the hapless youth is tost,
Now heaved on high and now in whirlpools lost.

His wearied feet no more his will obey,
His arms hang useless and forget to play.
Borne on the surge supine and void of breath,
He drinks the briny wave and draws in death.
Thus while in fatal rage each wind conspires
Extinct at once the flame and lovers' fires,

Fainting he sinks and with the torch expires.'

This translator can versify, thanks to his model, Mr. Pope. But he has washed out Musæus, and the true picture of a strong swimmer worn out. Exit reality, exit feeling; for who cares who is drowned, if he is drowned in such hollow phrases as this-borne on the surge supine and void of breath, and if his arms forget to play? Confound them! were they asleep, then, on this sportive occasion? Such treatment is wonderful in its way; it spares the incident, yet somehow extracts all the terror and pathos from it.

Now Mr. Arnold's verses bring tears into intelligent eyes, tears that the occasion merits. The lines are strong above, but tender below, and almost tempt us to turn versifier ourselves, and say of his work:

The heart of pity guides the hand of skill.'

But indeed it is so all through the composition. The Greeks were sketchy; they gave fine indications, but stopped short of the picture that nevertheless was in their minds; Mr. Arnold, with light but effective touches, has completed the meanings, and raised the key of colour, and, above all, has filled the whole work with heart. And this has been done without verbal amplification; the Greek poem is 340 lines, the English 431; but as the hexameter is a foot more than the English heroic verse, the poems have nearly the same number of feet. If we go into syllables, the Greek, of course, has more than the English.

One vice of the time he has not entirely escaped-new English compounds. Critics, unfortunately, have long let these weeds grow for flowers, but that is only because criticism has sunk so low compared with other arts. What business have 'salt-soaked,' ‘faint-seen,' and flower-right' in so fair a poem as this? They are warts on the satin skin of Beauty. The reader of delightful poetry should never be checked in his joyful rush by new compounds. Besides, ours is a language that does not lend itself readily to compounds, and has already a household word for every idea worth singing.

In poetry everything is either immortal or bad. Now, of the ten thousand new compounds inflicted on English verse in the last century, how many have taken root? We know but one-ivymantled;' and 'ivy-mantled' remains because it combines many good things that do not meet in the new uncouth compounds. It is grammatically constructed; it is rhythmical (the others are the reverse, generally speaking), and it supplies a valuable idea and expresses a genuine beauty, since ivy, expanding as it rises, does really

clothe a house like a mantle.

But as a rule new words cripple

poetry, and are one of the worst vices of the day.

Why not

'Faint-seen upon the violet eastern sky.'

'Seen faintly on the violet eastern sky'?

We feel we are a little hard upon Mr. Arnold here; but he is better acquainted with the language than his fellows, so he has less excuse for ever running out of it in poetry.

To conclude, then, it is here proved that a foreign poem can be Englished, and gain beauty, not lose it; but there are two essential conditions: the translator must be a poet himself, and a master of English.

And now a few words on the value of the poem to English writers. What is the difference between a poet and a poetaster?

Were this question put by royal commission to all the educated people in England, and the answers printed, we should find how very little modern criticism has instructed society.

The poet and the poetaster are what they were three thousand years ago, and will be three thousand years hence. The poet is a 'maker,' an inventor;' he is a bard who can conceive and tell a grand story in golden verse-I mean verse that really resembles gold, possessing the weight, the beauty, and the ring of that imperial metal-and set in that story many pearls; characters, speeches, that orators might envy, descriptions of nature, but all subordinate to the theme.

The poetaster is a versifier, who can produce all these subordinate beauties, but cannot create a strong story. He is a sower of detached pearls, and a putter-forth of beauties à propos de rien. He will sing you, like any nightingale, the spring, and the flowers, and the falling apples, and the standing corn, and the purling brook, and the water-lilies, and the sunset, apropos of nothing at all. He scatters flowers as pretty as the poet's, but he cannot construct a wreath.

Now and then he catches a glimpse of the truth that poetry is one of the forms of fiction, and he attempts a story; then you find him out; his stream of narrative has no lack of concomitant beauties; it creeps through some weeds, alias new compounds, but it also creeps through fair bulrushes, and luscious water-lilies and daffodils embroider the bank. All the stream wants is-water; and that is just what the poet's stream abounds in, yet not a waterlily the less.

To change the metaphor, the poetaster is a poet with a weak backbone, or none at all. The poetæ minores of the ancients wrote exquisite verses, and so do our poetæ minores, or poetasters; but the poetæ minores could not, and our poetasters cannot, tell a grand

story grandly in golden verse. Now it is a mistake to suppose that this defect, wherever it exists, is incurable. As the art of constructing a story in prose can be learned in time, so can the art of constructing a story in verse be learned by hard study. And this Hero and Leander is a good basis for that wholesome study.

Dismiss the preliminary verses-twenty-eight in number; for these are conventional, and a Grecian mistake; the writer announces what he is going to say-a terrible blunder in art.

Begin at

'Honey-sweet Hero of a princely race,'

and in 400 lines you have a masterpiece: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, all clearly defined, and exactly the right number of words is given to each incident. There are few greater difficulties in writing poetry than this. If you fling down a powerful incident, and do not spend enough words on it, and keep it and, above all, its effects on your personages, long enough before your reader, you might as well chuck your incident into the Thames or a newspaper paragraph. If you dwell too long on it, and on the effect produced by it on your characters, the reader becomes impatient, and says to himself: She has cried long enough for the loss of that one child;' If you are going to drown Leander, drown him ;' This king is an unconscionable time dying;' and so on. Now in Hero and Leander both the Scylla and Charybdis of this difficulty are escaped with unerring tact, and on a general view the poem is just the right length for the subject. That subject is powerful and salient, but not wide, and the 400 lines exhaust it. Let young aspirants to poetry profit by this; let them abandon the modern and ephemeral notion that poetry can be divorced from fiction; let them search for powerful germs like the legend here immortalised; for what the naturalists say in their science is also true in art: Omne vivum ex ovo.' And when they have found or invented a good ovum, let them admit no topic that does not advance the action; let them steer wisely between crudity and garrulity, remembering that the latter is the worst of the two, and the commonest vice of writers in every age. We are convinced that the road to a great epic lies through these small epics, of which Hero and Leander is a perfect model; and, if these crude hints are taken, more than one rising poet will owe much to Mr. Edwin Arnold, and something, though not so much, to us, who are so charmed and touched by it, that we have forgotten to gratify our vanity by picking holes in it, and feel more inclined to say to unobtrusive merit: Friend, go up higher.'

MY PICTURES

IT is not in the storied corridor

Of the old ancestral hall,

Where the belted knight and the lady bright
Smile from the tapestried wall;
Where a Guidos' tender radiance shows
By a Rubens' gorgeous hues,

Or the stately grace of a Vandyke face
By the soft slow glance of a Greuze.

Drawn on no earthly canvas,

By no mortal pencil limn'd, Ne'er glorified by an age's pride,

By no poet's pæan hymn'd:

By the quiet hush of the winter's hearth,
Or the breathless nights of June,
Are my pictures seen by the firelight's sheen,
Or framed by the silvery moon.

They rise around me, one by one,
The lost, the changed, the dead;
I see the smile I knew ere while
On the sweet lips dewy red;
The soft dark eyes flash love for me,
The soft curls gleam and wave,
Till I half forget how my life sun set
'Neath the yews by a lonely grave.

I see white robes and blushing flowers,
And two close side by side;

Nor think how deep is the bridegroom's sleep,
As I watch him clasp his bride.

I look in the gentle mother's face,

Till her blessing is breathed again;

While the father's eyes, strong, true, and wise, Call counsel and calm to pain.

I seem to smooth the golden curls

Toss'd back from the child's pure brow, And prize them as then, though the whirl of men Has smirch'd their glitter now.