[227] The ‘abrupt and laconic structure’ of Glover’s periods appears at the very commencement of Leonidas, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the martial hero.

     The virtuous Spartan who resign’d his life
     To save his country at th’ Oetaen straits,
     Thermopylae, when all the peopled east
     In arms with Xerxes filled the Grecian plains,
     O Muse record!  The Hellespont they passed
     O’erpowering Thrace.  The dreadful tidings swift
     To Corinth flew.  Her Isthmus was the seat
     Of Grecian council.  Orpheus thence returns
     To Lacedaemon.  In assembly full, &c.

Glover’s best passages are of a soft character.  This is a pleasing Homerism: 

                                 Lycis dies,
     For boist’rous war ill-chosen.  He was skill’d
     To tune the lulling flute, and melt the heart;
     Or with his pipe’s awak’ning strains allure
     The lovely dames of Lydia to the dance. 
     They on the verdant level graceful mov’d
     In vary’d measures; while the cooling breeze
     Beneath their swelling garments wanton’d o’er
     Their snowy breasts, and smooth Cayster’s streams
     Soft-gliding murmur’d by.  The hostile blade, &c.  Bk.  VIII.

And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp.  II. 109: 

                          Placid were his days,
     Which flow’d through blessings.  As a river pure,
     Whose sides are flowery, and whose meadows fair,
     Meets in his course a subterranean void;
     There dips his silver head, again to rise,
     And, rising, glide through flow’rs and meadows new;
     So shall Oileus in those happier fields,
     Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds
     In mists dissolve, nor white descending flakes
     Of winter violate th’ eternal green;
     Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind,
     Nor gust of passion heaves the quiet breast,
     Nor dews of grief are sprinkled.  Bk.  X. S.C.

He told us that he had read Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.[228] I understood him thus myself, and W—–­ interpreted Klopstock’s French as I had already construed it.  He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our poets in general.  He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH.  All the translations had been bad, very bad—­but the English was no translation—­there were pages on pages not in the original:  and half the original was not to be found in the translation.  W—–­ told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics—­he then said to me in English, ’I wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!’

[228] This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock’s school and bed-fellow.  Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow.