alone, but the prose and verse generally of our early times, even literal translations from the stores of a Leipsig circulating library might appear familiar and congenial.
Doubtless, it must be allowed that our ideas, and to a certain extent our emotions, depend on the language in which they are to be conceived and embodied; and while in Great Britain one might almost say that intellectual energies are restrained by the strict conventional forms in which they are to be expressed,—in Germany, every nuance of thought can at once be seized and communicated; in proof of which, it is only necessary to observe, that many passages in Shakespeare, which excite doubts even in an English commentator, are rendered by Voss and Schlegel clear and effective. Still better examples are afforded by the versions of Homer, Sophocles, and Eschylus, proving that the most difficult Greek may be transfused faithfully into a modern tongue. Cal-
