It would be easy to extend our quotations; but we have given enough of Mr. Longfellow's translation to show with what conceptions of duty to the original he came to his task, and how perfectly that duty has been performed. According to his theory, then, as we gather it from these volumes, translation is not paraphrase, is not interpretation, is not imitation, but is the rigorous rendering of word for word, so far as the original difference of idioms permits. Its basis is truth to the form as well as to the thought, to the letter as well as to the spirit, of the text. The translator is like the messengers of the Bible and Homer, who repeat word for word the message that has been confided to them. He, too, if he would be true to his office, must give the message as it has been given to him, repeat the story in the words in which it was told him. Every deviation from the letter of the original is a deviation from the truth. Every epithet that is either added or taken away is a falsification of the text. The addition or the omission may sometimes be an improvement, but it is an improvement which you have no authority to make. It is not to learn what you think Homer or Dante might have said that the reader comes to your translation, but to see what they really said. When Cesarotti undertook to show how Homer would have written in the eighteenth century, he recast the Iliad and called it "The Death of Hector," and in this he dealt more honestly with his readers than Pope; for, although he failed to make a good poem, he did not attempt to pass it for Homer. The greatest difficulty of the translator arises from his personality. He cannot forget himself, cannot guard, as he ought, against those subtle insinuations of self-esteem which are constantly leading him to improve upon his author. His own habits of thought would have suggested a different turn to the verse, a different coloring to the image. He finds it as hard to forget his own style, as to forget his identity. It demands a vigorous imagination, combined with deep poetic sympathies, to go out of yourself and enter for a time wholly into the heart and mind, the thoughts and feelings, of another; and it is not to all that such an imagination and such sympathies are given. There is scarcely a great failure in poetical translation, which may not be traced to the want of this power.