The achievement of Bryant’s declining years was his translation of Homer. He had at various times amused himself with renderings of one or another passage that pleased him in foreign tongues. He was an ardent admirer of the Greek epics. He was dissatisfied with the versions of Cowper and Pope. It is possible that he was acquainted with the counsels of Matthew Arnold, called forth by the Homer of Francis Newman. The favour met by his attempts with the Odyssey encouraged him to try his hand at the Iliad. On the death of his wife, in 1866, he felt the need of some employment to distract his attention, and resolved to translate the Iliad entire. By 1869 he had finished the first twelve books, at the rate of from forty to seventy-five lines a day. These twelve books were published in February, 1870, the remainder of the Iliad in June. By the first of July he was engaged upon the Odyssey; on December 7, 1871, he sent his printers “the twenty-fourth and concluding book of [his] translation of Homer’s Odyssey, together with the table of contents for the second volume.” To misunderstand the repression of feeling in these simple words, with which the venerable Bryant takes leave of his final work, is to miss the hidden fire animating his whole existence. In a great poet there is little waste of energy in the outward expression. The moment feeling shows itself, it is transmuted into artistic form. The form is adequate, but it is something different from the sentiment that gives it life. The excellence of Bryant’s blank-verse translation of Homer is not a theme for long discussion here. He aimed at simplicity and faithfulness. He rejected several of the customary ornaments of modern verse, choosing for his medium that rhythm which is most nearly related to the cadence of everyday speech. Tested by its effect on the layman of the present day, his attempt is more successful than other well-known metrical versions, less than the cadenced prose of translators, like Myers and Lang, who have profited by the advice of Arnold with respect to diction, but in avoiding the trammels of metre have followed the example set by the scholars of King James in the Authorised Version of the Scriptures. However, Bryant’s rendering is too noble a piece of imaginative scholarship to be passed over.