Or thrown ashore dripping from the rough main,
Still pour'd the lay with thy all-powerful aid
In praise of Bacchus and the heavenly Nine,
And made bright Venus and her boy his theme,
And sang his black-eyed love with locks of jet;
O shell, soft trembling in the hands divine
Of Phœbus, at the feasts of Jove supreme,
Sweet nurse of care, favour thy suppliant yet!"
We cannot refrain from quoting another, perhaps still more beautiful.
"Fount of Bandusia, crystalline, most pure,
Worthy wine-offerings, and the flower-wove wreath!
To-morrow, vow'd to thee, a kid beneath
The knife shall bleed, whose swelling brows mature
Bud with their primal horns, and seem secure
Of future fight, and love already breathe
Wanton: Vain presage! for he soon in death
Shall stain thy streams with ruddy drops impure.
Thy icy streams the dog-star's burning hour
Afflicts not; in their cool the toil'd ox laves
His scorched sides; thy shades refresh the flocks.
Fame too is thine, if aught the poet's power
Who sings thy dipping oaks, romantic caves,
And prattling rills light-leaping from their rocks."
In his translation of a Chorus in the Phenissse of Euripides, he has endeavoured, and we think successfully, to trace a strong resemblance to a celebrated passage in Shakspeare.
"Grim visag'd war, wherefore do blood and death
Than merry meetings more thy temper suit?
Why labour still for the victorious wreath?
Nor rather capering with nimble foot
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute,
Join wanton nymphs in their delightful measures,
Their brows with garlands bound; like clustering fruit
While o'er thy front are shook its youthful treasures?
An no! these sportive tricks are not among thy pleasures.
In dreadful inarch, and with alarum stern,
Thy mailed warriors thou dost love to lead;
And now their bloody way the Argives learn
To Thebes:—Thou, mounted on thy barbed steed,
Boundest before them o'er Ismenus' mead,
To where the fearful adversaries pour,
Seizing their hung up arms, with frantic speed
Unto the walls, and people every tower.
Dark, dark the clouds above our royal house that lower!"
The translation from Tyrtæus is very dull, but the fault is in the original. Tyrtæus, it is said, roused the martial enthusiasm of the Spartans by his poetry. If so, it is a proof that the Spartans had no taste—for nothing can be heavier and more spiritless than his remains. The Poet-Laureate, Pye, translated some of those martial effusions with kindred lumpishness and a few lines read to a volunteer company by their Colonel, set the soldiers into a sound sleep on parade. Polwhele rendered them still more somniferous, for they overcame the wakefulness of the Cornish miners; and, lastly, Professor Young of Glasgow recited them in choice English to two hundred sleeping tyros, in the Greek class-room of that university. We had forgotten Mr Charles Elton, who himself fell fairly asleep during the process of translation—and the present version seems to have been made between a snore and a yawn, and is the most powerful soporific in the whole materia poetica. We decline quoting any part of it, lest our readers should be unable to peruse the rest of this article.
The Translator, however, soon gets upon better ground, and gives us about twenty select sonnets from Petrarch. We have compared his translations with those of Mrs Dobson, Dr Nott, and many anonymous writers, and they far outshine them all, both in fidelity and elegance. It is a most miserable mistake, to believe that Petrarch has no genuine sensibility. Is not his 24th Sonnet of Book II. most pathetic? It is thus exquisitely rendered:
"The eyes, the arms, the hands, the feet, the face,
Which made my thoughts and words so warm and wild,
That I was almost from myself exil'd,
And render'd strange to all the human race:
The lucid locks that curl'd in golden grace,
The lightening beam that when my angel smil'd
Diffus'd o'er earth an Eden heavenly mild:
What are they now? Dust, lifeless dust, alas!
And I live on! a melancholy slave,
Tost by the tempest in a shattered bark.
Reft of the lovely light that cheer'd the wave;
The flame of genius, too, extinct and dark.
Here let my rays of love conclusion have;
Mute be the lyre; tears best my sorrows mark."
One other quotation, and we must say good-bye to this accomplished scholar and gentleman.
