so sweetly echoed in Dr. Neale's familiar,—
"Brief life it here our portion," &c.,
becomes in the hands of the exact (?) translator,—
"Briefly we tarry here, briefly are harried here,
Here is brief sorrow;
But not to brevity comes our longevity
Due on that morrow,"
the movement whereof I have heard compared by a sensitive critic to the clanking of chains.
A second English translation of "Mirèio," by H. Crichton, was published by Macmillan & Co., London, in 1868. This version, which I examined with interest after my own was completed, is a metrical one, but seems to have failed to win English readers to an adequate appreciation of "Mirèio."
One word about my imperfect rhymes, the rather as there is a species of critic whose peculiar aliment such rhymes seem to be. I hope I have not strained too far that by-law of prosody which authorizes their occasional employment. In a long poem composed like this of consecutive rhyming lines, and where the poverty of our language in perfect rhymes soon becomes painfully apparent, they are, I venture to think, not only allowable, but agreeable. Rhymes in which the consonant sounds correspond, while the vowel sounds only approximate,—and this is the only kind
