Dr. Parsons:—­

  “Then, turning round to them, I thus began: 
    ’Francesca! tears must overflow mine eyes: 
  My pitying soul thy martyr-throes unman;
    But tell me,—­in the time of happy sighs,
  Your vague desires how gave Love utterance first?”
    And she to me:  “The mightiest of all woes
  Is, in the midst of misery, to be cursed
    With bliss remembered,—­this thy teacher knows. 
  Yet, wouldst thou learn our passion’s root and head,
    As one may speak whose eyes with tears are dim,
  So will I speak.  Together once we read
    The tale of Lancelot,—­how Love bound him. 
  Alone we were without suspecting aught: 
    Oft in perusal paled our cheeks their hue,
  And oft our eyes each other’s glances caught;
    But one sole passage ’t was which both o’erthrew. 
  At reading of the longed-for smile,—­to be
    By such a lover’s kissing so much blest,
  This dearest—­never shalt thou part from me! 
    His lips to mine, to mine, all trembling, pressed. 
  The writer was our Galeot with his book:—­
    That day we read no further on.”  She stopped: 
  Meanwhile he moaned so that compassion took
    My sense away, and like a corse I dropped.

Observe that Dr. Parsons has put Dante’s twenty-eight lines of eleven syllables into twenty-four lines of ten syllables; and this without losing a drop of the precious stream he undertakes to pour.  But why does he make Francesca address her companion personally, instead of saying, “who shall never part from me?” And why does Mr. Dayman say, “pious drops,” instead of piteous?  Mr. Dayman and Mr. Longfellow fill up the twenty-eight lines.  In neither of the three is there any strain or wresting of the sense.  But all three, and before them Lord Byron and Carey, mistranslate this passage,—­

  “Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
    Quella lettura.”

All these translators interpret it to mean, that while they read, their eyes often met; whereas Dante says, they read that passage over more than once; or, literally rendered, several times that reading or passage drew to it their eyes.  To restore the meaning of the original adds to the refinement of the scene.

Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as compassionate instead of pitiful or piteous, recognize for know, palpitating for trembling, conceded that you should know for gave you to know?  By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his poetic hands.  The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to poetic expression.  Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian.  And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines.