It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation.  He told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last.  I looked at him with much emotion—­I considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative.  My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them.  In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy—­Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled.  By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder—­the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man’s skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt.  It is an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of Nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.—­The author of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.—­His powder and periwig were to the eye what Mr.  Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superiour power which the German language possessed of concentrating meaning.  He said, he had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one.  In English you cannot do this.  I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter.  He did not understand me:[229] and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not.

[229] Klopstock’s observation was partly true and partly erroneous.  In the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous.  I have translated some German hexameters into English hexameters, and find, that on the average three English lines will express four lines German.  The reason is evident:  our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables.  The German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language.  But in another point of view the remark was not without foundation.  For the German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases.  I will content myself with one example at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles ver, zer, ent, and weg:  thus reissen to rend, verreissen to rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of a thing, in the active sense: