Not only all greatness would be out of it, but its very motion would be gone; the husbandman would not sow,.in the uncertainty of a crop.

These maxims, therefore, are not guides, but cautions, and, if to be used in life, it is but as the sculls of the boatman, who sometimes pulls with one more than the other, as the bias of his boat requires; their conjoined action resulting in a forward motion, which is in the direction of neither. They are only useful if you have the skill to employ them properly.

How different is the life-guiding faculty of a principle! "Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you," and suum cuique tribuito—" render to every one his own," are not mere maxims, but principles of action, which are well fit to run straight through life, from the cradle to the grave, requiring no antagonism to correct their action. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," would have crippled Nelson's career, who, at Copenhagen and elsewhere, would seem to have been for the "Nothing venture nothing have " aspect of proverbial wisdom.

XI.

HEXAMETERS.

«N modern hexameters I fail to perceive the impress of poet, or matter, as in the Latin and Greek. All English hexameters, as far as I have perceived, on score of measure and rhythm, might have been written by the same man. In German there appears to me a similar impediment to individualizing the poet's music. Schiller, and Goethe,

and Voss, draw singularly near in the march of their hexa

meters, and for the same reason, that all three are in the same hobble of having to select words to suit a measure alien to the language, instead of those that are wont to express their own ideas. The thoughts, remember, of a great poet have, for the greater part, long dwelt with him, and, consciously to the poet or not, have selected for themselves familiar expression long before their actual utterance in formal publishing fashion. They float in the mind in rhythmic and significant affinities, ready to break out into metrical form, in fragmentary portions of which, by natural bias of a poet thinking in his own tongue, they have long combined. All this will be broken through by casting those thoughts into an alien metre, the exigencies of which require associate phrases to separate, and the thoughts to utter themselves anew. In this process the brooding spirit of the poet will have to retranslate itself, with consequent abatement of affluent expression.

Take hexameters in the tongues, be it Greek or Latin, to which they belong, and you feel at once that the measure is at home here, and the individuality of the poet comes out with strength in the unrestrained use of the vernacular. The hexameters of Homer and Hesiod are strikingly different in the very march of the metre; and for subject, I think a different rhythmic handling is perceptible between the Iliad and Odyssey, both Homeric, both, in my belief, from the same master-mind, and differenced but by the theme; and both, for instance, differing from the poor poet of the Argonauts on the one hand, and that thorough poet of pastoral, Theocritus, on the other.

The Latin, again-that ear must be dull, indeed, or little accustomed to weigh the matter, that feels no difference in the hexameters of the jovial and loose-slippered Horace, and the stately, and somewhat frigid, march of the Virgilian metre. And Lucretius differs from Virgil in this respect, though imitated of the latter, as Dryden by

Pope. There is an affluent ebullience in the hexameters of the elder poet, which the most enthusiastic admirers would scarcely claim for the Æneid or the Georgics. The hexameter, in short, belonged to the language, and so took the impress of the poets, differing in each as our blank verse differs in Milton, Young, and Cowper. Show me the English hexameters that differ like English blank

verse.

One fatal difficulty in the way of free hexameters in English is the reluctance of our tongue to furnish spondees for the purpose. Its iambic character compels rejection of expressive words to a most inconvenient extent where the measure is used. Polysyllables, with their fixed accent, will be found intractable; and the words of one syllable, which take any accent, according to emphasis, will not much mend the matter; for, except at the fifth and sixth foot, the reader cannot beforehand be sure if he is to group them into dactyls or spondees, and will, therefore, have to scan the verse in order to read it. This were much as if you should ask a musician to read off an air, of which the notes, indeed, are given, but not with distinction of crotchet and quaver.

Blank verse, and the other metres in our language, accept all its words, and the verses read themselves. The Greek and Roman hexameter accepted all in like manner. Hexameter is a channel through which Greek and Latin flow freely, and through which English will not flow, though, at great sacrifice, it may be partially forced.

I should expect to find a relation between the quantity in separate words of a language, and the rhythmic compositions of that language. If, for instance, hexameters be well fitted for Latin and Greek, the single words in those languages will have metrical affinity to that verse; the bulk of the words of four syllables, for example, would not carry the iambic quantity of the English word "ǎbān

donment," nor would the single words in general show alienation to consecutive long syllables, but, on the contrary, the language, as a whole, pour forth spondees and dactyls in equal abundance; being, in short, an aggregate of metrical fragments, and affluent in either kind. With other material no poem of the true hexameter structure could be built, whatever the pains bestowed on it, and whatever the genius, though, with the right material, the noblest will almost seem to rise of itself at the Amphioncall of a master.

Perhaps one test of the congeniality of a rhythm with a language is that of men unintentionally falling into it when talking or writing prose. In Latin prose several instances of unconscious hexameter have been noticed by ancient authors, and in English it is not uncommon for speech to fall into blank verse, but we might talk a long while before it fell into hexameters. The injury to the English poet of employing hexameter is this, that his garnered ideas, his dearest thoughts, unconsciously to himself, have associated in fragments of iambic verse; and noun and epithet will have to separate and recombine for the alien measure.

Who cares for further illustration of the writer's sentiments on this subject is referred to his work on "Homer and English Metre," p. 9, where the matter is considered with reference to translation.

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XII.

ON LANGUAGE-LEARNING.

[The substance of two letters to a friend, July 9 and 24, 1858.]

JOU have hit the nail on the head. Any difference on the topic will probably turn out to be due to misapprehension of the other's meaning. I had certainly failed in conveying mine when you understood me to think "that in any translation we must not misrepresent the word in order to adapt it to our own language." General translation, or the best mode of conveying the contents of a foreign work to those who have no intention of acquiring the language in which it is written, was not for a moment in my mind. Such translation will have special requirements of its own, varying, I had almost said, with each work, but certainly with each class of works; requirements which will especially remove it from the only kind then in my thoughts, viz., translation made by the translator purely for the purpose of teaching himself the language from which he is translating, for that was the subject-matter of our conversation. And if, in the elliptic method of small chat on broad topics, I expressed myself too briefly, the present epistle bids fair to make amends. To what length the " tediousness may reach there is no saying, till we get to "Yours, very truly;" but whatever the 66 amount, were it ten times as much, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all," &c. To resume, however. Such learner I would recommend to write down, sentence by sentence, a literal translation of the author he has fixed on for that purpose. But how literal? As literal as he can make it without writing bad English. Idioms that he meets with, are to be given in the written