r _me_, let's say. Didn't I tell you I was wasting my time?
And Venus is the goddess of Love: some day--alas the day!--you'll be
proud to make her acquaintance. . . . _Cras amet qui nunquam
amavit_."

"Perhaps if you read it to me--"

He shook his head.

"No, child: the thing is late in half a dozen different ways.
The young, whom it understands, cannot understand it: the old, who
arrive at understanding, look after it, a thing lost. Go, dear:
don't let me waste your time as well as an old man's."

But when she had gone he sat on and wasted another hour in
translating--

Time was that a rain-cloud begat her,
impregning the heave of the deep.
'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stam-
peding the dolphins as sheep,
Lo! born of that bridal Dione, rainbowed
and bespent of its dew:--
Now learn ye to love who loved never--now
ye who have loved, love anew!

She, she, with her gem-dripping finger
enamels the wreath of the year;
She, she, when the maid-bud is nubile and
swelling, winds--whispers anear,
Disguising her voice in the Zephyr's--'So
secret the bed! and thou shy?
'She, she, when the midsummer night is
a-hush draws the dew from on high;
Dew bright with the tears of its origin, dew
with its weight on the bough,
Misdoubting and clinging and trembling--
'Now, now must I fall? Is it now?'

Brother Copas pushed the paper from him.

"What folly is this," he mused, "that I, who have always scoffed at
translations, sit here trying to translate this most untranslatable
thing? Pah! Matthew Arnold was a great man, and he stood up to
lecture the University of Oxford on translating Homer. He proved
excellently well that Homer was rapid; that Homer was plain and
direct; that Homer was noble. He took translation after translation,
and proved--proved beyond doubting--that each translator had failed
in this or in that; this or that being alike essential. Then, having
worked out his sum, he sat down and translated a bit or two of Homer
to encourage us, and the result was mere bosh."

--"The truth being, he is guilty of a tomfoolery among principles at
the start. If by any chance we could, in English, find the right way
to translate Homer, why should we waste it on translating him?
We had a hundred times better be writing Epics of our own."

--"It cannot be done. If it could, it oug