wice-lost Eurydice.

It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of
his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of
Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but
shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that
shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual
telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to
die--_Moritura!_ then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass
the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which
she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her
companions.

"Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps,
Immanem ante pedes hydrum _moritura_ puella
Servantem ripas alta non vidit in herba."

At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the
Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one
burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers!

At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremos
Implerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiae arces,
Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus,
Atque Getae, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.

That the vivid emphasis of a stormy sorrow--given to a picture of sound in
the foregoing verses, by that distinctiveness of the multitudinous
repetition--declines in the melodious four English representatives to a
greatly more generalized expression, must, one may think, be ascribed to
Dryden's despair of reconciling in his own rougher tongue the geography
and the music. Nevertheless, the version is evidently and successfully
studied, to mourn and complain.

But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tear
With loud lament, and break the yielding air:
The realms of Mars remurmur all around,
And echoes to the Athenian shores resound.

It is good, but hardly reaches the purpose of the original clamour, so
passionate, dirge-like, unearthly, and supernatural--at once telling the
death--as they say that in some countries the king's death is never told
in words, but with a clangour of shrieks only from the palace-top, which
is echoed by voices to voices on to the borders of his kingdom--at once,
we say, supplying this point of the relation, and impressing upon you the
superhuman character of the mourners, who are able not only to deplore,
but likewise mysteriously and mightily to avenge.

The next three lines are also, as mi