ative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling
into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which
enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the
same, powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear
powder--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an
old man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood
appear only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men,
that you think of them as parts of Nature; and anything of trick and
fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews
clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should have
worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye what
_Mr_. Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superiour power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:[229] and I, who
wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
not.

[229] Klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In
the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the
average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the
two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters
into English hexameters, and find, that on the average three English
lines will express four lines German. The reason is evident: our
language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less
than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view
the remark was not without foundation. For the German possessing the
same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions
and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek
word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of
weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one example
at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles _ver_, _zer_,
_ent_, and _weg_: thus _reissen_ to rend, _verr