there to a Keats) meaningless,
flat, and puzzling. There remains the third class of those who have a
certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to
enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without an
expenditure of time and trouble which is virtually prohibitive. It
is to this class that a translation ought, it would seem, chiefly to
address itself. An intelligent person of cultivated literary taste,
and able to read the easier books in an acquired language, will feel
himself indebted to a hand which unlocks for him the inner chambers
of a temple in whose outer courts he had already delighted to wander.
Without therefore saying that the merely 'English reader' may never
derive pleasure and instruction from a translation of a foreign poet,
for to this rule our current version of the Hebrew psalmists and
prophets furnish one marked exception at least--still, it is probably
to what may be called the half-learned class that the translator must
preeminently look to find an audience.

The other causes of Pindar's unpopularity to which reference was made
above, the obscurity of his thought and the monotony of his subjects,
will in great measure disappear by means of attentive study of the
poems themselves, and of other sources from which may be gathered an
understanding of the region of thought and feeling in which they move.
In proportion to our familiarity not only with Hellenic mythology and
history, but with Hellenic life and habits of thought generally, will
be our readiness and facility in seizing the drift and import of what
Pindar says, in divining what has passed through his mind: and in his
case perhaps even more than in the case of other poets, this facility
will increase indefinitely with our increasing acquaintance with his
works and with the light thrown on each part of them by the rest[1].

The monotony of the odes, though to some extent unquestionably and
unavoidably real, is to some extent also superficial and in appearance
only. The family of the victor, or his country, some incident of his
past, some possibility of his future life, suggest in each case some
different legendary matter, some different way of treating it, some
different application of it, general or particular, or both. Out
of such resources Pindar is inexhaustible in building up in subtly
varying forms the splendid structure of his song.

Yet doubtless the drawbacks in reading Pindar, though they may be
largely