proves that he had in him, as Drayton said of Mar

low,

"Those brave translunary things,

That our first poets had."

It is this abandoned earnestness and willingness and simplicity which so much elevate the writers of that age above nearly all succeeding ones. In their companionship, a certain pardoning and compromising restraint, which hampers us in the society of less unconscious writers, seems to be thrown off the mind. Here, at last, we find frankness; contempt of consequences; dignity that finds graceful sustenance in the smallest and most ordinary events of to-day, as well as in the greatest, or in prophecies of a nobler to-morrow. They laid the deep-set bases of their works and thoughts in the cheap but eternal rock of nature, not idly writing their names upon the shifting and unstable sands of a taste or a prejudice, to be washed out by the next wave, or blurred and overdrifted by the first stronger breeze. Pegasus is the most unsafe of hobby-horses. The poet whose pen is governed by any self-built theory (even if he persuade men to believe in it) will be read only so long as that theory is not driven out by another.

JOHN.

Yet a creed or theory may sometimes be of good service in the cause of truth. They concentrate the will and energy of a strong mind upon one

point, and so lead to the discovery of such facts as intersect that point in their revolutions; as the wells of the old astronomers, by shutting out all light from around, enabled them to see the else invisible stars.

PHILIP.

But the credit should rather be given to the concentrated resolution, than to the creed or theory. Resolution is the youngest and dearest daughter of Destiny, and may win from her fond mother almost any favor she chooses to ask, though in very wantonness. The great spirits of that day were of no school, except that in which their own soul was mistress. The door to the temple of any creed was too low to admit men of their godlike stature without stooping, and that they could not do. They scorned those effeminate conventionalities which, half a century later, decked our ruddy English Muse in the last Paris modes, bound up and powdered her free golden hair, and so pinched her robust waist that she has scarce borne a healthy child since. Poesy, with them, was not an artifice in the easy reach of any whose ear could detect the jingle of two words, and who had arithmetic enough to count as high as ten on their finger-ends. They believed that Poesy demanded the enthralling and ennobling toil of a whole life, the heart, soul, will, life, everything, of those who professed her service. They esteemed her the most homelike and

gentle of spirits, and would not suffer her to travel abroad to bring home licentiousness veiled under a greater precision of manner, at the expense of all freedom and grace. The innocent artlessness of

her face looked sweetest to them in the warm firelight upon the hearth of home. They knew that all the outward forms of poetry are changeable as those of a cloud. These fall away like the petals of a flower, but they leave the soul, the plain, sober seed-vessel which most men pass by unregarded. Parnassus is now shrunk to a modern mountain ; Hippocrene has dwindled to a scant rill, which the feet of a single ox can make muddy through its whole course ; but while the heart remains, the poet's fountain bubbles up as clear and fresh as

ever.

JOHN.

Only that part of a form which is founded in nature can survive; the worth of the statue of Memnon as an oracle died with the wise priest who spoke through it, but, after three thousand years, it still recognizes its ancient god, and grows musical under the golden fingers of sunrise. I confess I can hardly shake off the influence of early education in favor of the French school of poets. I admire the others with a kind of reverence, as grand, natural, unpruned spirits; but I find my entertainment, too, in these, as in the society of elegant gentlemen with whom artificiality has been carried

well-nigh to the unconscious ease of nature. Dryden

PHILIP.

But I will not grant him for one of them. He could not smother his sturdy English spirit. His Gallicism is ridiculous, as in his plays. It is not ingrained. I will give you an example of what English-French must be, by quoting a specimen of French-English. Here is a French translation of Gray's Odes, published at Paris, in the sixth year of the Republic.

JOHN.

Without allowing it to be an argument, I can conceive that it must be a great curiosity. Let me hear some of it.

PHILIP.

You will not be disappointed. It is in prose, and the translator avows that his sole object has been to be literally exact. Fidelity first, then elegance, is his motto; but you will see that he has not forgotten the lessons of the posture-master. He tells us in his preface that he undertook the enterprise,

"autant pour faciliter l'intelligence de la langue Anglaise, que pour faire connoître en France un digne rival d'Ossian, de Dryden, et de Milton. Exactitude rigoureuse à la lettre et au sens, voilà la systême qu'on a cru devoir adopter. Mais en s'attachant à rendre littéralement les pensées, les expressions, les images, et les figures de l'auteur Anglais, on n'en a pas

moins senti la nécessité d'écrire avec purété, élégance, et

précision."

In the first Ode, the line,

"Disclose the long-expecting flowers,"

is rendered,

"Elles ouvrent le bouton des fleurs impatientes." "Some show their gayly-gilded trim,

Quick glancing in the sun,"

"D'autres dans leurs jeux vifs et légers, font étinceler au soleil l'or de leur élégante parure.”

In the "Ode on a distant View of Eton College," "Father Thames" is translated "fleuve paternel"; and the lines,

"This racks the joints, this fires the veins,

That every laboring sinew strains,"

are thus given :

"L'une torture les articulations, l'autre allume le sang; celles-ci tiraille douloureusement tous les nerfs."

In the fourth Ode,

"Stern, rugged nurse! thy rigid lore,

With patience many a year she bore,"

is rendered,

"Austère et rude institutrice, c'est sous ta discipline sévère qu'elle apprit à exercer sa patience pendant nombre d'années." In the fifth Ode,

"To brisk notes in cadence beating,

Glance their many-twinkling feet,"

"Rapides comme le clin-d'œil, leur pieds brillans répondent en cadence à la vivacité des airs";

"With arms sublime that float upon the air,

In gliding state she wins her easy way,"