Then drags him o'er the lake, deprived of breath;
And downward plunging, sinks his soul to death.
But now the great Psicharpax shines afar

(Scarce he so great whose loss provoked the war).
Swift to revenge his fatal javelin fled,

And through the liver struck Pelusius [Prassophagus] dead; His freckled corse before the victor fell,

His soul indignant sought the shades of hell.

This saw Pelobates, and from the flood
Lifts with both hands a monstrous mass of mud:
The cloud obscene o'er all the warrior flies,
Dishonors his brown face, and blots his eyes.
Enraged, and wildly sputtering from the shore,
A stone immense of size the warrior bore,
A load for laboring earth, whose bulk to raise,
Asks ten degenerate mice of modern days:
Full to the leg arrives the crushing wound;
The frog, supportless, writhes upon the ground.

Thus flushed, the victor wars with matchless force,
Till loud Craugasides arrests his course:
Hoarse croaking threats precede; with fatal speed
Deep through the belly runs the pointed reed,
Then, strongly tugged, returned imbrued with gore,
And on the pile his reeking entrails bore.
The lame Sitophagus, oppressed with pain,
Creeps from the desperate dangers of the plain:
And where the ditches rising weeds supply,
To spread the lowly shades beneath the sky;
There lurks the silent mouse, relieved of heat,
And, safe embowered, avoids the chance of fate.
But here Troxartes, Physignathus there,
Whirl the dire furies of the pointed spear:
Then where the foot around its ankle plies,
Troxartes wounds, and Physignathus flies,
Halts to the pool, a safe retreat to find,
And trails a dangling length of leg behind.
The mouse still urges, still the frog retires,
And half in anguish of the flight expires.
Then pious ardor young Prassæus brings,
Betwixt the fortunes of contending kings:
Lank, harmless frog! with forces hardly grown,
He darts the reed in combats not his own,
Which faintly tinkling on Troxartes' shield,
Hangs at the point, and drops upon the field.
Now nobly towering o'er the rest appears
A gallant prince that far transcends his years,

Pride of his sire, and glory of his house,
And more a Mars in combat than a mouse:
His action bold, robust his ample frame,
And Meridarpax his resounding name.
The warrior, singled from the fighting crowd,
Boasts the dire honors of his arms aloud;
Then strutting near the lake, with looks elate,
Threats all its nations with approaching fate.
And such his strength, the silver lakes around
Might roll their waters o'er unpeopled ground,
But powerful Jove, who shows no less his grace
To frogs that perish than to human race,
Felt soft compassion rising in his soul,
And shook his sacred head, that shook the pole.
Then thus to all the gazing powers began

The sire of gods, and frogs, and mouse, and man :
"What seas of blood I view, what worlds of slain!
An Iliad rising from a day's campaign!

How fierce his javelin, o'er the trembling lakes,
The black furred hero, Meridarpax, shakes!

Unless some favoring deity descend,
Soon will the frogs' loquacious empire end.
Let dreadful Pallas winged with pity fly,
And make her ægis blaze before his eye:
While Mars, refulgent on his rattling car,
Arrests his raging rival of the war."

He ceased, reclining with attending head,
When thus the glorious god of combats said:
"Not Pallas, Jove! though Pallas take the field,
With all the terrors of her hissing shield;
Nor Mars himself, though Mars in armor bright
Ascends his car, and wheel amidst the fight:
Not these can drive the desperate mouse afar,
And change the fortunes of the bleeding war.
Let all go forth, all heaven in arms arise;

Or launch thy own red thunder from the skies;
Such ardent bolts as flew that wondrous day,
When heaps of Titans mixed with mountains lay
When all the giant race enormous fell;
And huge Enceladus was hurled to hell."

'Twas thus th' armipotent advised the gods,
When from his throne the cloud compeller nods;
Deep-lengthening thunders run from pole to pole,
Olympus trembles as the thunders roll.

Then swift he whirls the brandished bolt around,
And headlong darts it at the distant ground;

The bolt discharged, inwrapped with lightning flies,
And rends its flaming passage through the skies:
The earth's inhabitants, the nibblers, shake;
And frogs, the dwellers in the waters, quake.
Yet still the mice advance their dread design,
And the last danger threats the croaking line;
Till Jove, that inly mourned the loss they bore,
With strange assistance filled the frighted shore.

Poured from the neighboring strand, deformed to view, They march, a sudden unexpected crew.

Strong suits of armor round their bodies close,
Which like thick anvils blunt the force of blows;
In wheeling marches turned, oblique they go;
With harpy claws their limbs divide below;
Fell shears the passage to their mouth command;
From out the flesh the bones by nature stand;
Broad spread their backs, their shining shoulders rise,
Unnumbered joints distort their lengthened thighs;
With nervous cords their hands are firmly braced,
Their round black eyeballs in their bosom placed;
On eight long feet the wondrous warriors tread,
And either hand alike supplies a head.
These to call crabs mere mortal wits agree;
But gods have other names for things than we.

Now, where the jointures from their loins depend,
The heroes' tails with severing grasps they rend.
Here, short of feet, deprived the power to fly;
There, without hands, upon the field they lie.
Wrenched from their holds, and scattered all around,
The blended lances heap the cumbered ground.

Helpless amazement, fear pursuing fear,

And mad confusion through their host appear.
O'er the wild waste with headlong flight they go,
Or creep concealed in vaulted holes below.

But down Olympus, to the western seas,
Far-shooting Phoebus drove with fainter rays:
And a whole war (so Jove ordained) begun,
Was fought, and ceased, in one revolving sun.

NO FINAL TRANSLATION OF HOMER POSSIBLE.

BY BUTCHER AND LANG.

THERE would have been less controversy about the proper method of Homeric translation, if critics had recognized that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and the literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the Elizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, - namely, daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman's verse Troy must "shed her towers for tears of overthrow"; and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their sport must be called "the horrid tennis."

In the age of Anne, "dignity" and "correctness" had to be given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, his netteté, his command of every conventional and favorite artifice. Without Chapman's conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed tame, rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost point of view. Again, when Europe woke to a sense, an almost exaggerated and certainly uncritical sense, of the value of her songs of the people, of all the ballads that Herder, Scott, Lönnrot, and the rest collected, it was commonly said that Homer was a ballad minstrel; that the translator must imitate the simplicity, and even adopt the formulæ, of the ballad. Hence came the renderings of Maginn, the experiments of Mr. Gladstone, and others. There was some excuse for the error of critics who asked for a Homer in ballad rhyme. The epic poet, the poet of gods and heroes, did indeed inherit some of the formula of the earlier Volks-lied. Homer, like the author of "The Song of Roland," like the singers of the "Kalevala," uses constantly recurring epithets, and

230 NO FINAL TRANSLATION OF HOMER POSSIBLE.

repeats, word for word, certain emphatic passages, messages, and so on. That custom is essential in the ballad; it is an accident, not the essence, of the epic. The epic is a poem of consummate and supreme art; but it still bears some birthmarks, some signs of the early popular chant, out of which it sprung, as the garden rose springs from the wild stock. When this is recognized, the demand for balladlike simplicity and "ballad slang" ceases to exist, and then all Homeric translations in the ballad manner cease to represent our conception of Homer. After the belief in the ballad manner follows the recognition of the romantic vein in Homer; and as a result came Mr. Worsley's admirable Odyssey. This masterly translation does all that can be done for the Odyssey in the romantic style. The liquid lapses of the verse, the wonderful closeness to the original, reproduce all of Homer, in music and in meaning, that can be rendered in English verse. There still, however, seems an aspect of the Homeric poems, and a demand in connection with Homer, to be recognized and to be satisfied.

Sainte-Beuve says, with reference probably to M. Leconte de Lisle's prose version of the epics, that some people treat the epics too much as if they were sagas. Now the Homeric epics are sagas; but then they are the sagas of the divine heroic age of Greece, and thus are told with an art which is not the art of the Northern poets. The epics are stories about the adventures of men living in most respects like the men of our own race who dwelt in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The epics are, in a way, and as far as manners and institutions are concerned, historical documents. Whoever regards them in this way must wish to read them exactly as they have reached us, without modern ornament, with nothing added or omitted. He must recognize, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that what he now wants-namely, the simple truth about the matter of the poem

can only be given in prose, "for in a verse translation no original work is any longer recognizable." It is for this reason that we have attempted to tell once more, in simple prose, the story of Odysseus. We have tried to transfer, not all the truth about the poem, but the historical truth, into English. In this process Homer must lose at least half his charm: his bright and equable speed, the musical current of that narrative, which, like the river of Egypt, flows from an indiscoverable source, and mirrors the temples and the palaces of unforgotten gods and kings. Without this music of verse, only a half truth about