their
primitive concrete picturesqueness. They are to him just as good as our
Saxon words are to us. Though cold and merely intellectual to us, they
are to him warm with emotion; and this is one reason why we cannot do
justice to his poetry, or appreciate it as he appreciates it. To make
this perfectly clear, let us take two or three lines from Shakespeare:--

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude,
Thy tooth is not so keen," etc., etc.;

which I have somewhere seen thus rendered into French:

"Souffle, souffle, vent d'hiver!
Tu n'es pas si cruel
Que l'ingratitude de l'homme.
Ta dent n'est pas si penetrante," etc., etc.

Why are we inclined to laugh as we read this? Because it excites in us
an undercurrent of consciousness which, if put into words, might run
something like this:--

"Insufflate, insufflate, wind hibernal!
Thou art not so cruel
As human ingratitude.
Thy dentition is not so penetrating," etc., etc.

No such effect would be produced upon a Frenchman. The translation would
strike him as excellent, which it really is. The last line in particular
would seem poetical to us, did we not happen to have in our language
words closely akin to dent and penetrante, and familiarly employed in
senses that are not poetical.

Applying these considerations to Mr. Longfellow's choice of words in his
translation of Dante, we see at once the unsoundness of the principle
that Italian words should be rendered by their Romanic equivalents
in English. Words that are etymologically identical with those in the
original are often, for that very reason, the worst words that could be
used. They are harsh and foreign to the English ear, however homelike
and musical they may be to the ear of an Italian. Their connotations are
unlike in the two languages; and the translation which is made literally
exact by using them is at the same time made actually inaccurate, or at
least inadequate. Dole and dolent are doubtless the exact counterparts
of dolore and dolente, so far as mere etymology can go. But when we
consider the effect that is to be produced upon the mind of the reader,
wretchedness and despairing are fat better equivalents. The former may
compel our intellectual assent, but the latter awaken our emotional
sympathy.

Doubtless by long familiarity with the Romanic languages, the scholar
becomes to a great degree ema