those particulars of the shambles and the spit which to the troubadour of barbarism seem as delightful as the images of the harvest and the vintage?  Poetry can be translated into poetry only by taking up the ideas of the original into the mind of the translator, which is very difficult when the translator and the original are separated by a gulf of thought and feeling, and when the gulf is very wide, becomes impossible.  There is nothing for it in the case of Homer but a prose translation.  Even in prose to find perfect equivalents for some of the Homeric phrases is not easy.  Whatever the chronological date of the Homeric poems may be, their political and psychological date may be pretty well fixed.  Politically they belong, as the episode of Thersites shows, to the rise of democracy and to its first collision with aristocracy, which Homer regards with the feelings of a bard who sang in aristocratic halls.  Psychologically they belong to the time when in ideas and language, the moral was just disengaging itself from the physical.  In the wail of Andromache for instance, adinon epos, which Pope improves into “sadly dear,” and Cowper, with better taste at all events, renders “precious,” is really semi-physical, and scarcely capable of exact translation.  It belongs to an unreproducible past, like the fierce joy which, in the same wail, bursts from the savage woman in the midst of her desolation at the thought of the numbers whom her husband’s hands had slain.  Cowper had studied the Homeric poems thoroughly in his youth, he knew them so well that he was able to translate them, not very incorrectly with only the help of a Clavis; he understood their peculiar qualities as well as it was possible for a reader without the historic sense to do; he had compared Pope’s translation carefully with the original, and had decisively noted the defects which make it not a version of Homer, but a periwigged epic of the Augustan age.  In his own translation he avoids Pope’s faults, and he preserves at least the dignity of the original, while his command of language could never fail him, nor could he ever lack the guidance of good taste.  But we well know where he will be at his best.  We turn at once to such passages as the description of Calypso’s Isle,

  Alighting on Pieria, down he (Hermes) stooped. 
  To Ocean, and the billows lightly skimmed
  In form a sea-mew, such as in the bays
  Tremendous of the barren deep her food
  Seeking, dips oft in brine her ample wing. 
  In such disguise o’er many a wave he rode,
  But reaching, now, that isle remote, forsook
  The azure deep, and at the spacious grove
  Where dwelt the amber-tressed nymph arrived
  Found her within.  A fire on all the hearth
  Blazed sprightly, and, afar diffused, the scent
  Of smooth-split cedar and of cypress-wood
  Odorous, burning cheered the happy isle. 
  She, busied at the loom and plying fast
  Her golden shuttle, with melodious voice