Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent critics are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote. This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the “Saga Library.” Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem. And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for himself in the latter portion of his career. There is in these delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets. The last of all of them—the one of which the last two chapters, when he could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, in the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he died—will be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called ‘The Sundering Flood,’ and was written after the story ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles.’ It (‘The Sundering Flood’) is as long as ‘The Wood beyond the World,’ but has lyrics interspersed.