Why does Mr. Longfellow use such long words as _compassionate_ instead of _pitiful_ or _piteous_, _recognize_ for _know_, _palpitating_ for _trembling_, _conceded that you should know_ for _gave you to know_? By the resolution to translate line for line, Mr. Longfellow ties his poetic hands. The first effect of this self-binding is, to oblige him to use often long Latin-English instead of short Saxon-English words, that is, words that in most cases lend themselves less readily to poetic expression. Mr. Dayman, not translating line for line, is free from this prosaic incumbrance; but as he makes it a rule to himself that every English canto shall contain the same number of lines as its original, he is obliged, much more often than Mr. Longfellow, to throw in epithets or words not in the Italian. And Dr. Parsons, who, happily freeing himself from either verbal or numerical bond, in several instances compresses a canto into two or three lines less than the Italian, and the XXXI. into nine lines less, might with advantage have curtailed each canto ten or twelve lines. Do what we will, poetic translation is brought about more from without than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the words; he sacrifices the spirit to the letter; he overlays the poetry with a verbal literalness; he deprives himself of scope to give a billowy motion, a heightened color, a girded vigor, to choice passages. The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have--contrary to all good usage--the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante? Whatever the cause of its use, the effect is still farther to weaken his translation. These loose poetic endings--and on most pages one third of the lines have eleven syllables and on some pages more than a third--do a part in causing Mr. Longfellow's Dante to lack the clean outline, the tonic ring, the chiseled edge of the original, and in making his cantos read as would