Oh, well each knew the strong, the brave, the just, The passage is thus transcribed by Mr. Browning :— Woes, then, in household and on hearth, are such As these and woes surpassing these by much. For those who from the land Of Hellas issued in a band, Sorrow, the heart must bear, Sits in the home of each, conspicuous there. Many a circumstance, at least, Touches the very breast. For those Whom any sent away-he knows : And in the live man's stead, Armour and ashes reach The house of each. For many recognised obscurities of phrase in the Agamemnon of Eschylus Mr. Browning may have had a special regard. They help to show that he is himself not the first poet who must be read with close attention by those who would understand him, and who then cannot be always understood. Difficulties in execution of the 'transcript' have been lightened by the license of rhyme already referred to. The under-current of humour in his original verse justifies Mr. Browning's method, but it does not in itself constitute what it is sometimes called, a singular mastery of rhyme, being, in serious verse, no more than an evasion of difficulty. Any one who is no poet, but may have cared to practise himself in the mechanism of English versification, will have found how often a comic rhyme or whimsical license will cut a knot that is not easy to untie. Now and then it may be hacked through rather than cut. It can scarcely be supposed that Mr. Browning, if he had seen how to avoid it without loss of literalness, would willingly have made a chorus say— Robert Browning's highest praise is not that of a rhymer. But the rhyming is the least part of a poet's art. One ground of satisfaction in Mr. Browning's work on the Greek dramatists, considered as an element in Recent Literature, is that it represents in its best form the contact of the English mind in the nineteenth century with Greek literature and art. One feature of the reaction from that French classical influence which formalised no small part of European literature at the close of the seventeenth and VOL. III.-No. 12. CC during many years of the eighteenth century is, among us, the Hellenism that has replaced the old blind worship of the Latins who wrote in or near the time of Augustus. Young Pope's 'immortal Vida, on whose honoured brow the poet's bays and critic's ivy grow,' did not hesitate to place Virgil above Homer. See, he said, or Christopher Pitt said after him in translation of his Latin verse,— See how the Grecian bards, at distance thrown, With rev'rence bow to this distinguished son. "Vocem que animumque Deo similis,' says Vida. He thought and spoke in every word a God.' Virgil has, in our day, lost his divine honours. The finest English Virgil scholar of our century, the late Professor Conington, translated him ten or twelve years ago into what Scott called the light horseman kind of measure' of the Lay of the Last Minstrel; a sort of rhyme that would have made an eighteenth century scholar's hair stand on end, if his head had not been shaved to give the wig close-fitting dignity. Mr. William Morris lately followed suit with a good English translation of Virgil into ballad measure. The fresh fancy of the Greeks, with depths of thought under its quick variety, that felt man as a part of nature and brought free souls into contact with the mystery and beauty of the world, was again a life-giving influence when bonds of formal classicism were thrown off. The new energies set free by the reaction of which the French Revolution was one sign, restored England to fellowship in the true national life that found voice in the literature of her own Elizabethan days, and in those days also the Greeks were greater to us than the Latins. Greek studies, brought into Europe after the Turks took Constantinople, came in aid of the great movement for Church reformation. Cave a Græcis, ne fias hæreticus,' said those who opposed boldness of free thought; and in Protestant countries Plato became as another Father of the spiritual Church. Queen Elizabeth read Demosthenes with Roger Ascham. Marlowe began to translate the Greek poem of Hero and Leander ascribed to Musæus. George Chapman finished that work of Marlowe's, and in the reign of James the First completed a translation of all works ascribed to Homer. The revival of a national life with free utterances of far-reaching thought, that dared aspire to highest things through questioning of all, and was haunted with dreams of a glory yet to be attained on earth, lifted our literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Keats, who knew little Greek, caught from Chapman the sense of beauty and power in the world of Homer, and felt, he says, in so reading him, Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes As the century grows old, and the excitement of a start on a new course, which filled with energetic utterance its early days, has passed away but left us steadily advancing at a sober pace, there abides with us the renewed love of our own national literature in the days when it was fresh and free, and at the same time the representatives of English thought still fall more readily under the influence of the old Greek than of the Roman mind. Some years ago there was an intellectual epidemic in this country for translating Homer into metres of all kinds. Most people seemed to be translating Homer, many had their translations published, and those who were not translating argued about those who were. Mr. Matthew Arnold lectured at Oxford On Translating Homer, and argued upon the subject in 1861 with Mr. F. W. Newman, who had translated the Iliad in 1856. Greek culture has had a marked influence on Mr. Matthew Arnold's genius as a poet, and his Merope published in 1858 was an attempt to produce an original dramatic poem as nearly as possible in the old Greek dramatic form. Mr. Swinburne first won wide recognition of his genius by the beauty of a dramatic poem, Greek in form-Atalanta in Calydon-which owes much of its charm to his own full enjoyment of Greek literature. Mr. Morris in his Earthly Paradise continually drew from the stores of old Greek fancy, and has developed throughout a long poem the fable of Jason. So also the author of Songs of Two Worlds went to Greek fable when he produced lately his first work upon a larger scale, The Epic of Hades. When Mr. Aubrey de Vere prefaced his dramatic poem of Alexander the Great 3 with an explanation of its point of view, in a conception of Alexander which is nearer to Dr. Thirlwall's than to Mr. Grote's, he found in the Macedonian one seeking an empire of the world that would have been an empire of intellect, scattering over its subject realms not Roman municipalities, but Greek schools.. This was to him the best side of his subject. Though Alexander did. not realise that dream, the Greek dominion (said Mr. Aubrey de Vere) has not been lost to man: it has been a dominion of mind; and a primary condition of its full realisation was,. probably, the extinction, not the extension, of its political greatness. Alexander had aspired to give one small spot on earth's surface, Greece, a power extending over the earth, and to Mind a temporal dominion which, being a universal one, as well as the creation of human ambition, must have proved but a splendid prison house, not a guarantee for freedom and strength. But there existed a region,. smaller even than Greece, to which had been awarded a sceptre stronger than either arms or mere intellect can bestow, a spiritual sceptre, and a kingdom founded on the soul. The best literature of Greece is as one devout inscription on the altar, To the unknown God.' If Plato was a Christian before Christ,' Alexander the Great. A Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey de Vere. H. S. King & Co. 1874. Eschylus burns often as with the fire of prophets who foretold Christ. In Prometheus Bound already 'the Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint' as the old gods are shaken on their thrones and the vision of an age to come glows under the veil of the Greek poet's verse, as if he too were an Isaiah. In Agamemnon, human life speaks from its depths, and no blind fate is ruler of the destinies of men. οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ἔπαλξις πλούτου πρὸς κόρον ἀνδρὶ λακτίσαντι μέγαν δίκας βωμὸν εἰς ἀφάνειαν which Mr. Browning translates : For there's no bulwark in man's wealth to him Those truths of life which were enshrined in the old Greek mythology, the author of the Songs of Two Worlds reads, in his Epic of Hades, with the Christian added to the Greek sense of Two Worlds for man. What Francis Bacon dwelt on as the Wisdom of the Ancients, he brings into relation with the inner life of our own day. So the old myths were read by our Elizabethan poets. When, in Peele's Arraignment of Paris, Enone, not yet forsaken, ran through her themes of song and bade Paris choose what she should sing, every theme had its lesson in a truth of life. She could sing How Phorcys' imp, that was so trick and fair, A piece of cunning, trust me, for the nones, Reproves disdain, and tells how form doth vade. With more in the like strain. Precisely thus, the author of the Epic of Hades, with simple grace and dignity of earnestness, has made the soul of our time speak through tales of Tantalus and Phædra, Marsyas, Adonis, Herakles, and many more, without confusion of their outlines or destruction of their beauty. He might have prefaced his Epic of Hades as Bacon prefaced his little book De Sapientiâ Veterum, which I quote through its translation in 1619 by Sir Arthur Gorges: The Wisedome of the Ancients it was, either much or happy; much if these figures and tropes were invented by studie and premeditation. Happy if they (intending nothing less) 6 The Ee of Hades. By the author of Songs of Two Worlds. H. S. King & Co. 1876. Third Edition, 1877. gave matter and occasion to so many worthy meditations.' In the three series of poems entitled Songs of Two Worlds, by a New Writer, through which this author first made his genius known, there is a homage to the genius of Henry Vaughan, the best poet of George Herbert's school, and one who in some poems of his Silex Scintillans rises to a spiritual music rivalling the pure strains of Herbert's Temple. The new writer,' by a regard for such old writers as these, implied what his work shows, a tendency to look at Nature from the spiritual side. So it is that he feels, and would have us feel through his Epic of Hades, how, to express his idea through words of his own, -evermore All things and thoughts, both new and old, are writ and in the world, Which is our Hades, still the chequered souls They know not to what end. The weary woman Fond dreamer seeks his high ideal love, And finds her name is death; still doth the fair With faint suggestion of plan from the Divine Comedy of Dante, like it divided into a Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise-Tartarus, Hades, and Olympus-the Epic of Hades opens with a February dawn in which the landscape looked like the weird land beyond the river of Charon, And forthwith on every side Rose the thin throng of ghosts. In the gloom of a dark grove, beckoning hands and noiseless feet flitted from shade to shade. These shapes, representing souls shut fast each in its gaol of woe, told him the causes of their pain, that yet should grow to healing. In Tantalus was The undying worm of sense, which frets and gnaws Constantly thirsting for new satisfaction of the sense, a thirst which runs through the tale of his life and is represented by his punishment, Tantalus is shown as a grand poetic type of what is known also in our own day as the used-up sensualist, who thinks himself a wise man of the world, having |