al object or incident could not fail. Why
did not Cowper go on writing these charming pieces which he evidently
produced with the greatest facility? Instead of this, he took, under
an evil star, to translating Homer. The translation of Homer into
verse is the Polar Expedition of literature, always failing, yet still
desperately renewed. Homer defies modern reproduction. His primeval
simplicity is a dew of the dawn which can never be re-distilled. His
primeval savagery is almost equally unpresentable. What civilized poet
can don the barbarian sufficiently to revel, or seem to revel, in the
ghastly details of carnage, in hideous wounds described with surgical
gusto, in the butchery of captives in cold blood, or even in those
particulars of the shambles and the spit which to the troubadour of
barbarism seem as delightful as the images of the harvest and the
vintage? Poetry can be translated into poetry only by taking up the
ideas of the original into the mind of the translator, which is very
difficult when the translator and the original are separated by a gulf
of thought and feeling, and when the gulf is very wide, becomes
impossible. There is nothing for it in the case of Homer but a prose
translation. Even in prose to find perfect equivalents for some of the
Homeric phrases is not easy. Whatever the chronological date of the
Homeric poems may be, their political and psychological date may be
pretty well fixed. Politically they belong, as the episode of
Thersites shows, to the rise of democracy and to its first collision
with aristocracy, which Homer regards with the feelings of a bard who
sang in aristocratic halls. Psychologically they belong to the time
when in ideas and language, the moral was just disengaging itself from
the physical. In the wail of Andromache for instance, _adinon epos_,
which Pope improves into "sadly dear," and Cowper, with better taste at
all events, renders "precious," is really semi-physical, and scarcely
capable of exact translation. It belongs to an unreproducible past,
like the fierce joy which, in the same wail, bursts from the savage
woman in the midst of her desolation at the thought of the numbers whom
her husband's hands had slain. Cowper had studied the Homeric poems
thoroughly in his youth, he knew them so well that he was able to
translate them, not very incorrectly with only the help of a Clavis; he
understood their peculiar qualities as well as it was possible for a