Ever, my Lord,
Most faithfully your obliged friend and servant,
WM. WORDSWORTH.[83]

Feb. 5 [1829].

MY LORD,

I am truly obliged by your friendly and frank communication.  May I beg that you would add to the favour, by marking with a pencil some of the passages that are faulty, in your view of the case?  We seem pretty much of opinion upon the subject of rhyme.  Pentameters, where the sense has a close of some sort at every two lines, may be rendered in regularly closed couplets; but hexameters (especially the Virgilian, that run the lines into each other for a great length) cannot.  I have long been persuaded that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the Georgics and the Aeneid, and I am so much struck with this resemblance, that I should have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been persuaded that no ancient author can be with advantage so rendered.  Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and feeling, are too remote from modern interest to allow it.  We require every possible help and attraction of sound, in our language, to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns.  My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided three faults be avoided:  baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to be given at all.  I will trouble you with an instance in which I fear this fault exists.  Virgil, describing Aeneas’s voyage, third book, verse 551, says—­

    ’Hinc sinus Herculei, si vera est fama.  Tarenti
    Cernitur.’

[83] Memoirs, ii. 69.

I render it thus: 

    ’Hence we behold the bay that bears the name
    Of proud Tarentum, proud to share the fame
    Of Hercules, though by a dubious claim.’

I was unable to get the meaning with tolerable harmony into fewer words, which are more than to a modern reader, perhaps, it is worth.

I feel much at a loss, without the assistance of the marks which I have requested, to take an exact measure of your Lordship’s feelings with regard to the diction.  To save you the trouble of reference, I will transcribe two passages from Dryden; first, the celebrated appearance of Hector’s ghost to Aeneas.  Aeneas thus addresses him: 

    ’O light of Trojans and support of Troy,
    Thy father’s champion, and thy country s joy,
    O long expected by thy friends, from whence
    Art thou returned, so late for our defence? 
    Do we behold thee, wearied as we are
    With length of labours and with toils of war? 
    After so many funerals of thy own,
    Art thou restored to thy declining town?’

This I think not an unfavourable specimen of Dryden’s way of treating the solemnly pathetic passages.  Yet, surely, here is nothing of the cadence of the original, and little of its spirit.  The second verse is not in the original, and ought not to have been in Dryden; for it anticipates the beautiful hemistich,