Horace -- Translations into English; Laudatory poetry, Latin -- Translations into English
confounded by giving it, what it has in the Latin, a separate form of
its own.
The remaining metres may be dismissed in a very few words. As a general
rule, I have avoided couplets of any sort, and chosen some kind of
stanza. As a German critic has pointed out, all the Odes of Horace,
with one doubtful exception, may be reduced to quatrains; and though
this peculiarity does not, so far as we can see, affect the character
of any of the Horatian metres (except, of course, those that are
written in stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must
be considered as a happy circumstance for those who wish to render
Horace into English. In respect of restraint, indeed, the English
couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is,
on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain
into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English
lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry
apparently involving a complexity which can only be represented by
rhymes recurring at intervals. In the case of one of the three poems
written by Horace in the measure called the greater Asclepiad, ("Tu ne
quoesieris,") I have adopted the couplet; in another ("Nullam, Vare,")
the quatrain, the determining reason in the two cases being the length
of the two Odes, the former of which consists but of eight lines, the
latter of sixteen. The metre which I selected for each is the thirteen-
syllable trochaic of "Locksley Hall;" and it is curious to observe the
different effect of the metre according as it is written in two lines
or in four. In the "Locksley Hall" couplet its movement is undoubtedly
trochaic; but when it is expanded into a quatrain, as in Mrs.
Browning's poem of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," the movement changes,
and instead of a more or less equal stress on the alternate syllables,
the full ictus is only felt in one syllable out of every four; in
ancient metrical language the metre becomes Ionic a minore. This very
Ionic a minore is itself, I need not say, the metre of a single Ode in
the Third Book, the "Miserarum est," and I have devised a stanza for
it, taking much more pains with the apportionment of the ictus than in
the case of the trochaic quatrain, which is better able to modulate
itself. I have also ventured to invent a metre for that technically
known as the Fourth Archilochian, the "Solvitur acris hiems," by
combining the fourteen-syllable with the ten-syllable iambic in an
alternately rhyming stanza. [Footnote: I may be permitted to mention
that Lord Derby, in a volume of Translations printed privately before
the appearance of this work, has employed the same measure in rendering
the same Ode, the only difference being that his rhymes are not
alternate, but successive.] The First Archilochian, "Diffugere nives,"
I have represented by a combination of the ten-syllable with the four-
syllable iambic. For the so-called greater Sapphic, the "Lydia, die per
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