rsification. If I take the
famous line which describes how the souls of the dead stood waiting by
the river, imploring a passage from Charon:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore,

and if I translate it, 'and were stretching forth their hands in longing
for the further bank,' the charm of the original has fled. Why has it
fled? Partly (but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
for five words, and those the words of Virgil, twelve words, and those
my own. In some measure because I have turned into rhythmless prose a
line of verse which, as mere sound, has unusual beauty. But much more
because in doing so I have also changed the _meaning_ of Virgil's line.
What that meaning is _I_ cannot say: Virgil has said it. But I can see
this much, that the translation conveys a far less vivid picture of the
outstretched hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a far less
poignant sense of the distance of the shore and the longing of the
souls. And it does so partly because this picture and this sense are
conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the
long-drawn sound of 'Tendebantque,' through the time occupied by the
five syllables and therefore by the idea of 'ulterioris,' and through
the identity of the long sound 'or' in the penultimate syllables of
'ulterioris amore'--all this, and much more, apprehended not in this
analytical fashion, nor as _added_ to the beauty of mere sound and to
the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the
poetic meaning of the whole.

It is always so in fine poetry. The value of versification, when it is
indissolubly fused with meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for
feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for feeling the value of
diction, is the _specific_ gift for poetry, as distinguished from other
arts. But versification, taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has a
very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it has; how much, you may
experience by reading poetry in a language of which you do not
understand a syllable. The pleasure is quite appreciable, but it is not
great; nor in actual poetic experience do you meet with it, as such, at
all. For it is not _added_ to the pleasure of the meaning when you read
poetry that you do understand: by some mystery the music is then the
music _of_ the meaning, and the two are one. However fond of
versification you might be, you would tire very soon of reading verse