What a sick heart the poet must have who would seek out such a story from the ancient world, appropriate it to himself, and burden himself with its tragic image! This will explain the following monologue, so laden with gloom and the despair of life; we recommend it to all lovers of declamation for serious practice. Hamlet’s monologue is here intensified. It will take considerable art especially to pick out the interpolations and yet keep the connection and the flow and smoothness of the whole. Besides it will be discovered that a certain vehement, even eccentric, expression is needed in order to do justice to the intention of the poet.[10] FOOTNOTES: [10] The quotation which follows here, translated by Goethe into German, is Manfred’s speech at the end of act 2, scene 2, beginning: “We are the fools of Time and Terror! Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.” BYRON’S _DON JUAN_[11] (1821) In hesitating some time ago to insert a passage from [Manzoni’s] _Count Carmagnola_, a piece which is perhaps translatable, and in the present instance making the daring attempt to take up and discuss the untranslatable _Don Juan_, it may seem as if we are guilty of an inconsistency. We shall therefore point out the difference between the two cases. Manzoni is as yet but little known among us, and it is better that people should learn to know his merits first in their complete fullness, as they are presented only in the original; after that, a translation by one of our young poets would be decidedly in order. With Lord Byron’s talent, on the other hand, we are sufficiently acquainted, and can neither help nor injure him by translation, for the originals are in the hands of all cultivated people. Yet such an attempt, even if it were attempting the impossible, will always have a certain value. For if a false reflection does not exactly give back the original picture to us, yet it makes us attentive at least to the mirror itself and to its more or less perceptible defects. _Don Juan_ is a work of infinite genius, misanthropical with the bitterest inhumanity, yet sympathetic with the deepest intensity of tender feeling. And since we now know the author and esteem him, and do not wish him to be otherwise than he is, we enjoy thankfully what he dares with overgreat independence, indeed insolence, to bring before us. The technical treatment of the verse is quite in accord with the singular, reckless, unsparing content. The poet spares his language as little as he does his men, and as we examine it more closely we discover indeed that English poetry has a cultivated comic language which we Germans wholly lack.