experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for
AEschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially
decline,--what may appear to brighten up a passage,--the
employment of a new word for some old one--[Greek: phonos],
or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners,
recurring four times in three lines.... Further,--if I
obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at
least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an
impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and
sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret,
inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but
nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And
lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the
result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to
resemble AEschylus."

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching
courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with,
indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very
slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found
needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy
accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of AEschylus. An
incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing
line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But
for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no
denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so
hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in
order to fully understand the English. Browning has anticipated, but not
altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those passages which
in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the
obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or
harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not
merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it:
phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses,
which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek
metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem
often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at
"the ideas of the poet." It is a Titan's version of an Olympian, and it
is thus no doubt the scholar rathe