l and the lightning dazzle. From what hand shall it fulmine
over England as over Greece? Yet the matter, the facts, the order, the
logic, are all easily enough to be transferred--not the passion and the
splendour, except by an orator, and even hardly by him; but Brougham has
grappled manfully with Demosthenes, though he hath somewhat diminished the
power of the Crown.

But in Poetry. Ay, there the difficulties grow--there all are
collected--and one equal to all, or nearly so, is added--VERSE! Of all
writers, the poet is the most exquisite in his words. His creations
revolve in them--live in them--breathe and burn. Shakspeare expresses
this--"the poet's _pen_ turns them to shape." Ariel, and Lear, and Hamlet,
are not except in the very words--their very own words. For the poet, of
all men, feels most susceptibly, sensitively, perceptively, acutely,
accurately, clearly, tenderly, kindly--the contact of his mind with yours;
and the words are the _medium of contact_! Yet, most of the ILIAD may be
transferred--for it is a history. The manners are easily depicted in a
Translation--so is the wonderful thinking that remains to us therein from
that remote lost world--and makes the substratum of the poem. In short,
that old world which Homer preserves, can be shown in a Translation, but
_not Homer himself_. The simplicity, and sweetness, and majesty, and the
musical soul and art, require Greek, and old Greek. A translation into
Attic Greek by Sophocles, would not be Homer. Into modern English? Alas,
and alack-a-day! An English translator might better undertake Euripides
than Sophocles, and Sophocles than AEschylus. AEschylus, Pindar,
Homer--these are the three terrors of Translation. Why? They are doubly so
remote! Distant so far, and distant so high! We should not, ourselves,
much care for undertaking Apollonius Rhodius, and Callimachus, although
the Alexandrian schoolmaster abounds in the poetical riches of the Greek
tongue, and the Cyrenaic hymnist has an unattainable spirit of grace and
elastic step. Yet we could, with a safe conscience, try; because if less
glory be attempted by the translator, less can be lost for his original.
Whereas, if we let down Homer, Pindar, AEschylus, we are lowering the
heights of the human spirit--_crimen laesoe majestatis_. In poetry the
absolutely creative power of the human spirit--that immense endowment and
privilege of the human being--is at its height. Many view this endowment
and privilege