a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a
billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice
passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity,
this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in
the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some
pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh
syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson
in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do
good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his
Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book
of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in
dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a
weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close
to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is
still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic
endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven
syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing
Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the
chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would
sound a high passionate tune played on a harp whose strings are
relaxed.

Looking at the printed Italian Dante beside the English, in a volume
where opposite each English page is the corresponding page of
the original, as in Mr. Dayman's, one cannot fail to be struck with
the comparative narrowness of the Italian column. This comes of the
comparative shortness of Italian syllables. For instance, as the
strongest exemplification, the ever-recurring _and_, and the
often-repeated _is_, are both expressed in Italian by a single letter,
_e_. And this shortness comes of the numerousness of vowels. In lines
of thirty letters Dante will have on an average sixteen consonants to
fourteen vowels, nearly half and half; while his translators have
about twenty consonants to ten vowels, or two to one. From this
comparative rejection of consonants, Italian cannot, as English can,
bind into one syllable words of seven or eight letters, like _friends_
and _straight_, nor even words of six letters, like _chimed_,
_shoots_, _thwart_, _spring_; nor does Italian abound as English does
in monosyllables, and the few it has are mostly of but two or three
letters. In combination its syllables sometim