It may seem like the grave enunciation of a truism to say that another indispensable qualification of the translator is perfect familiarity with the language from which he translates, and a full command of his own. It is not by mere reading that such a familiarity can be acquired. You must have learnt to think in a language, and made it the spontaneous expression of your wants and feelings, if you would find in it the true interpretation of the wants and feelings of others. Its words and idioms must awaken in you the same sensations which the words and idioms of your own language awaken; giving pleasure as music, or a picture, or a statue, or a fine building gives pleasure, not by an act of reflection under the control of the will, but by an intuitive perception under the inspiration of a sense of the beautiful. The enjoyment of a thought is partly an intellectual enjoyment; you may even reason yourself into it; but the enjoyment of style and language is purely an æsthetic enjoyment, susceptible, indeed, of culture, but springing from an inborn sense of harmony. To extend this enjoyment to a foreign language, you must bring that language close to you, and form with it those intimate relations between thought and word which you have formed in your own. The word must not only suggest the thought, but become a part of it, as the painting becomes a part of the canvas. It must strike your ear with a familiar sound, awakening pleasant memories of actual life and real scenes. Idioms are often interpreters of national life, giving you sudden glimpses, and even deep revelations, of manners and customs, and the circumstances whence they sprang. They are often, too, brief formulas, condensing thought into its briefest expression, with a force and energy which the full expression could not give. To mistake them, is to mistake the whole passage. Not to feel them, is not to feel the most characteristic form of thought. The preposition _da_ is one of the most versatile words in Italian. Its literal meaning is _from_; it is daily used to express _to_. _Da me_ may mean _from me_: it may also mean _to me_. _Fit_ or _deserving to be done_ is a common meaning of it; and it is in this sense that Dante uses it in the following passage from the fourth canto of Paradiso, fifty-fifth line:-- "Con intenzion _da_ non esser derisa,"-- With intention not (_deserving to be_) to be derided. Cary, though a good Italian scholar, translates it _to shun derision_; and, giving it this sense, quotes Stillingfleet to illustrate the thought which, for want of practical familiarity with the language, he attributes to Dante. We believe, then, that the qualifications of a translator may be briefly summed up under the following heads:-- He must be conscientiously truthful, studiously following his text, word by word and line by line. He must possess a thorough mastery over both languages, feeling as well as understanding the words and idioms of his original.