PREFACE
"They make me fancy," Symonds says of some lines of Tennyson, "that we moderns, with tamer fancy and feebler thought, have a better trick of versifying than Milton or Shelley."
Such an age may not be a great age for new discoveries in poetry: it ought to be a great age for translation. It might hand down a body of translation which should never be superseded. For if former translations, as Mr. Andrew Lang says in the case of Homer, became out-of-date, it was exactly because each age required and gave the peculiar colouring of its own thought. But we, whose thoughts have been so multiplied and who speak with so many tongues, are in a position, as our fathers were not, to realise to what elements in our own speech, to what stage of our own past, the language and thoughts of each epoch of antiquity correspond, and, realising this, to give the great works of antiquity a rendering which, if sometimes suffering from the defects of a compromise, is absolutely the best possible. It is inconceivable, for instance, that there will ever be an age of English literature to correspond more nearly with that of the Attic drama than the Elizabethan.
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