open grave, he occasionally admits, but he braves it out with the swaggering τῶ γέροντι μᾶλλον Πρέπει τὰ τερπνὰ παίζειν, Οσω πέλας τὰ μοίρης. brilliant indeed, and nimble in its motions, but born of corruption and associated with impurity. He is most emphatically a writer purissimae impuritatis. In his most immodest poems, though the very words seem to swoon with voluptuous exhaustion, there is a grace and elegance of diction, a glow of poetry, a fictitious refinement of He is then no sentimentalist, but a plain-spoken sentiment, that beguile the thoughtless reader debauchee, whose poetry depends, for the interest while the poison is stealing into his soul. He it excites in the reader's mind, more upon the never frightens the timid and fastidious by an attendant circumstances of his revels than upon explosion of coarse vulgarity. He is always ele- the revels themselves. The spring-time with its gant, always self-possessed, always alive to the flowers and breezes, the cup-bearer Cupid, the eautiful. He takes care to exhibit the bright groves shadowing the temple, the doves, the danside to the view of his reader. He lingers and cing graces, the distant view of the calm ocean, hovers round an impure thought like a bee round the garlands of flowers that crown his fevered a poison flower, sucking its honey and singing as brow, the carved work of his goblet-these, and as though it contained nothing but sweets. These such as these, are the images which linger in our traits fully qualify him to celebrate the retired and memory. It is the innocent portion of the Anacourtly joys of an oriental harem. His dreamy, creontics which gives them their peculiar charm. luscious poetry suits well an opium-eater's fancies How different from the translator's own voluptuof the Mohammedan heaven. But this grace ous poetry, in which every thing is made suborand gallantry is by no means a characteristic of dinate to an exquisite sensuality which forms at the ancient classics. Their voluptuousness is once the ground-work and entire interest of every coarse and material. If they have any thing poem. gross to say, they say it in the plainest and most unmistakable manner. They love wine because they like to be drunk, and they make no scruple of avowing their partiality. Their Epicureans are emphatically sensual writers, and their sensuality is unredeemed and uudisguised by any tinge of sentiment or gallantry. To leave these generalities, let us see how Moore has discharged the duties of a translator in particulars. The first fault we find with him is, that he has made no attempt to distinguish the genuine from the spurious odes of Anacreon. That the first ode in the translation is not the production of the Teian is manifest from its own Anacreon, the preface to the translation would internal evidence, as any one may see who reads have us believe, is an exception to this general it with the slightest attention. Yet the translator rule. He, we are told, possesses more refine- gives it to us as genuine, and finds fault with ment, more gallantry than his compeers. We others who, on his own favorite authority, the have looked in vain for any indications of this Vatican MS., attribute it with much show of refined sentiment in the Greek. He is, indeed, reason, to Basilius. The same negligence is apby no means so gross as Horace or Catullus. parent throughout this work. He takes the MS. He has written of pleasure, and scruples not to alluded to, as paramount authority, and receives avow himself its votary, but he is equally re- as genuine all the odes which it contains. He moved from the disgusting plainness of the Latins, seems to dread only the clumsy ecclesiastical verand the voluptuous lusciousness of his English sifiers of the early days of the church, but to have translator. Still, he is an ancient, a thorough no apprehension of those infinitely more pestiancient. He speaks of love, the ancient love, lent tribes, the grammarians and the emanuenses. often and plainly, and presents to us the lamen- The awkward emendations and interpolations of table picture of an old man nursing the memory these self-sufficient people, have defaced some of of by-gone sins, and fanning the dying embers of the most beautiful passages in the Greek and those desires which disgraced his youth by their Latin classics. They have been at their work untamed excesses. He seems to be immeasu- with the author before us. The consequence is, rably thankful to the Gods, that they have at that but few of the poems usually attributed to least left him in his old age, the privilege and the Anacreon are the genuine productions of that power of getting drunk. Wine and love are the exquisite poet. De Pauw, a skeptical and phleggreat themes of his muse, but now and then, in matic Dutchman, who has given to the world a lathe midst of his revelling, the form of death borious edition, has gone so far as to declare, throws its cold shadow over the flowers that lie that he does not believe any of the odes except sprinkled about him. He pauses one awe-struck a few fragments, to be Anacreon's. "Ambigo moment, and then dashes on in his reckless round maximopere," says he, "an inter hæc Anacreof pleasure. That he is old, that his feeble feet ontica vel unum sit hodié quod pro genuino Anaare tottering along the crumbling margin of the creontis factu haberi queat." He assigns several Here is not only a dilution almost Homeopa reasons for his incredulity, the principal of which is, that, according to the ancients, Anacreon thic of the meaning, but a total sacrifice of all wrote wholly in the Ionic dialect, whereas, in the odes attributed to him, there are scarcely any specimens of this dialect. "She gave thee beauty, shaft of eyes, the character and strength of the original. What a tame, common-place substitute for the striking figure chasm of teeth," is the "fangs of terror" If our translator has failed in the critical part in the English translation. The first two lines of his work, he has come no less short of his are interpolated. The words in italics are unauduty in rendering the language. One of the most thorized by the text. We are willing to allow striking characteristics of Anacreon is his simpli- some latitude of expression to a writer who transcity of diction. He is sparing in the use of similes lates a foreign poem into English verse, but so and very parsimonious in epithets. He rarely wide a range as this, is, to our notion, utterly inuses an adjective, and never a compound word, admissible. Nothing can excuse such slovenly unless it is very material to the idea he wishes to Hibernicisms, as first swimming on the ocean, convey. He uses his language to express his and a foot of air being armed. These are by no thoughts, not merely to embellish his pages. means isolated instances. We are constantly There is very little tendency to diffuseness about meeting with wholly unauthorized conceits, to him, much less than in Horace. His language wit: in the unadulterated odes is like a transparent stream which permits all it contains to be clearly seen, and gives a lustre to every thing it covers. Moore, on the other hand, is delighted to hear himself sing. His language is copious in adjectives and rich in epithets, usually well placed and picturesque, but sometimes most shockingly malapropos. These all, however, remind us of varnishes of various brilliant tints spread over a fine picture. However beautiful their colors may be, they do but conceal the sober harmony of the original coloring. As a necessary consequence of all this, he is very diffuse, spreading out his meaning in broad, thin, beautiful washes, where he should have concentrated it in strong, spirited Such a version as this, is not sufficiently close touches. A few extracts will fully exemplify our to the original to be called even an imitation. It meaning. We shall not take the well-known is not a paraphrase, because it does not expand ode Ocλw Xéysi Arpeídas, for he, himself, admits the ideas of the Greek, but substitutes new ones that it is rendered "rather paraphrastically." wholly foreign to the subject. The version has in truth, scarcely one recognizable feature of the original. Let us quote from its neighbor the 24th of that translation, the 2d of the common editions. φύσις κέρατα ταύροις κ.τ.λ. The literal rendering is as follows: Nature gave horns to bulls, Swiftness of foot to hares, To lions a chasm of teeth; To birds the power of flying, &c. Now let us have what Moore calls a translation. To all that breathe the airs of heaven, And winged with speed the panting hare. Now, what is the authority for all this? The original says simply: "What gave she them? Beauty, That woman who has beauty." In the twenty-sixth ode we have these words: "'Twas not the crested warrior's dart, How pressed down and running over with sweets of language is this ode. Adjectives spring up over it and through it, in the greatest abundance. Nor do we deny that they have their beauty; but we must contend that that beauty is by no means Anacreontic. What says the ode? the following is a bold translation. A horse did not destroy me, One adjective, new, in the whole passage. The sixth line is a conceit as unwarrantable as any in the worst passages of Pope's Iliad. fill Beauty sparkled in his eye; Through the mist of soft desire." Moore. Μεθύων 'όπως χορεύσω Literally. So that becoming drunk I may dance "And when the cluster's mellowing dews And reel as through the dance's round, &c. Moore. Literally, Where are pretty women "Where the glowing wantons rove." Moore. Σύρους-The Syrians. -"The amorous Syrian dames." Moore. Literally, Χαρίτεσσι συγχορεύων Dancing with the Graces "When, with the blushing naked Graces, Literally, Παρὰ σᾶις, Διόνυσε, σηκδις, κ. τ. λ. Near thy temples, O Bacchus, Moore. We should not be disposed to censure our poet so strongly for his use of adjectives if they aided the sense at all. But this they rarely do. They usually but display the fancy of the translator and his command of language without shedding one additional ray upon the meaning of the passage. Sometimes they seem designed to add some touches which the author forgot, to put in some scenery which the Greek left out. If so, the design is in as bad taste as though a painter should copy the figure of the Greek Slave, color the flesh and the trinkets about her, and then up the spare canvass with the slave-bazaar and the crowds of higgling dealers. Often these expletives are supremely absurd. We ask our readers if any admirer of Anacreon, (for such we profess ourselves) is not fully authorized to grumble at a translator who makes the old Greek ask Vulcan to carve him a "rose-lipped maid” in silver, as Moore does in the ode just cited? A graver fault than these is one which we We might multiply examples like these indefihave already hinted at in our remarks on the gen-nitely. They are scattered over the whole book. eral character of the translator's poetry. There We will not, however, condemn universally. is, in this version, a disposition to linger round Though we cannot admit the translation, as a voluptuous thoughts, and, as it were, to fondle whole, to be good, it contains some fine paraon them, which we do not find in the original. phrases in which the original is beautifully and The Greek says what he has to say, plainly but truthfully expanded. Thus what an admirable neither grossly nor glowingly. The Irishman copy of Mý diákonтe μíte píoye in Moore's line, helps him out, and gives a new spice and flavor to his verse, e. g. "Great Bacchus! in thy hallowed shade, "Just commingling, just dividing." It is impossible also to withhold our admira*By the stars, the Greeks particularly understood the tion from the expansion of Anacreon's thoughts constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor. The wain, as our readers are aware, is the cluster of large stars in in the following lines from the same ode, thongh Ursa Major. they certainly far outrun the sober limits of a translation, and abound in the faults we have elsewhere commented upon : “ Then her lip, so rich in blisses ! Sweet petitioner for kisses! Pouting nest of bland persuasion Ripely suing love's invasion." We would not be understood as being disposed to underrate our poet's lyrical abilities. Far from it. As an original writer of brilliant and touching scraps of song, we consider him above any recent poet. Few have written so much and so well. His longer poems have always appeared too diffuse, and altogether too cloying. The richness and sweetness of language which is charming in a song becomes wearisome in a longer poem. A drop of ottar of roses on a pocket handkerchief is delicious, but a gallon of it, spilt in a parlor, suffocates us. But, to return to Anacreon. We have ventured to translate into a short blank verse one of the most beautiful odes-one which drew from the saturnine De Pauw himself the exclamation, "Odarium mellitum et vere elegans!" and to present it to our readers in company with Mr. Moore's version, which is one of the closest he has made. In doing this, we are fully sensible of the awkward position in which we place ourselves, but we think the edge of ridicule may be turned by assuring our readers that we do not pretend to a spark of the mens divinior-that we have attempted nothing but the closest possible copy of the original, and the nearest approach we were able to make to the Greek measure, in order that those who do not read the classics might have the opportunity of estimating for themselves the merits of the version under consideration. Fidelity then being the only merit we claim for our piece, we make no more modest speeches, but present at once our humble effort. Once about the hour of midnight, 'Twas noon of night, when round the pole I hear the bitter night winds blow; I trimmed my lamp and oped the gate. Hath warmed his anxious fears away; which were then to be found in that and the [Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by neighboring palatinates of Poland. The revels John R. Thompson, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.] THE CHEVALIER MERLIN. CHAPTER TENTH. "Sir Belthazar did shake the silver bells of his bridle reins, and waft back from the tips of his gauntlet an adieu to that bright and now tearful beauty, whereof he had been the prisoner. Saying, in confirmation of these motions significant of the parting, Beautiful princess farewell! Love bath for too long a season subjected Belthazar the adventurous knight. But his ornaments shall now be arms, and not the silken robes, his pastime war and not the dance; instead of thy two lamps of love which are going out in the stream of thy tears, the stars which shine down on the world shall light him to his nightly rest. The Monkish romance of Sir Belthazar. of the preceding night had belated him, and lost him the dews which all good huntsmen delight to brush away when they go upon the chace. He was about to mount his horse, when Merlin came into the court and interrupted his departure with an account of the adventure with the strange cavaliers on the day before. He had been enabled to recal, and now mentioned, the obscure language of one of the strangers concerning the Sobieskis-the fact that the royal title was used in addressing him—and the declaration made, at his release, that he had been mistaken for another. "It is clear," said the Norwegian, “that these strangers mistook me for your majesty. Many things disquieted and engrossed me upon my return last night, and it is only this morning that I have reverted to the subject, and perceived your majesty's probable danger." "Thanks, chevalier," said Augustus; "you have done me a real and valuable service." The Norwegian passed the night which had begun with developments so important to his happiness, and which had brought to him honors so unexpected, in the solitude of his chamber, in He interchanged some thoughtful glances with the astrologer's tower. His reflections upon the D'Imhoff, and then promptly dismissed his attenrecent scene with the elector were not without dants who were in the bustle of mounting. a tinge of that distrust, which had for some time "I am reminded," he added to the Norwegian, aided to render his life at the chateau miserable." that it was your purpose to set off, to-day, upon It might be that the good prince had made a butt a journey to the camp of the king of Sweden. of him. The romance of Cervantes had not es- Do you still adhere to that purpose caped his reading, and there were points in that "I still adhere to it, sire." inimitable narrative which seemed to bear a sus- "You spoke last night," continued Augustus, picious resemblance to his own recent promotion "of my munificence. The hands of my geneto chivalric dignities. But he dismissed this sus-rosity are somewhat empty at present. Your picion after a time, and gave himself to grave God-fearing Swedes do not rob, but in an upright and pure thoughts. Whilst the revel of the elector continued, he prayed in the privacy of his turret chamber. The strong man, humbled before God, confessed his offences, and besought aid in the task of selfpurification. The morning star blazed like a beacon before his devotions were ended. Then he sought sleep, to prepare himself for the toilsome journey which by a swift determination he had fixed upon that day to begin. יין and lawful manner they do drain princes and nations quite effectually. But I still retain some means of manifesting my favour to a brave gentleman." "Your majesty's kind and courteous language," said the Norwegian, “would alone be an ample and honourable reward for the most valuable services." The Elector received this speech with a smile of pleasure. "Nevertheless," he said, "we must find some A morning bright and beautiful, and strangely more solid means of showing a royal regard— gorgeous in its early hues, followed the night so which, for the dignity of princes, if for no other spent. The very fires of the sun were of dull reason, should dispense bounty as its proof. The effect compared with the floating splendours of knight, my dear chevalier, whom you likened to that atmosphere which had promised his advent. the Paladins, possesses in spite of his poverty a The undulating country, plain and wooded, wear-good sword and a strong charger to bestow upon ing the motley of autumn, and covered with the a comrade." 66 jewelry of the frost-rime, lay like some region Sire," said Merlin, with some embarrassof enchantment, as the early hours advanced ment, "I came to the castle a poor soldier. Perabove it. mit me to leave it a poor soldier. I have honest At the third hour after dawn, the inmates of motives for so ungracious a request to your mathe chateau were astir with some unusual prepa-jesty." ration. The elector Augustus was, in fact, pre- This honest motive, which the Norwegian paring to take the field, to hunt the wild cattle scarcely defined to himself, was but the desire, in VOL. XV-72 |