As a translator, and he translated a great deal besides Homer, Chapman has called forth the most discordant opinions. It is plain from his prefaces and annotations that he had discussed with himself the various theories of translation, and had chosen that which prefers the spirit to the letter. “I dissent,” he says, speaking of his translation of the Iliad, “from all other translators and interpreters that ever essayed exposition of this miraculous poem, especially where the divine rapture is most exempt from capacity in grammarians merely and grammatical critics, and where the inward sense or soul of the sacred muse is only within eyeshot of a poetical spirit’s inspection.” This rapture, however, is not to be found in his translation of the Odyssey, he being less in sympathy with the quieter beauties of that exquisite poem. Cervantes said long ago that no poet is translatable, and he said truly, for his thoughts will not _sing_ in any language but their own. Even where the languages are of common parentage, like English and German, the feat is impossible. Who ever saw a translation of one of Heine’s songs into English from which the genius had not utterly vanished? We cannot translate the music; above all, we cannot translate the indefinable associations which have gathered round the poem, giving it more meaning to us, perhaps, than it ever had for the poet himself. In turning it into our own tongue the translator has made it foreign to us for the first time. Why, we do not like to hear any one read aloud a poem that we love, because he translates it into something unfamiliar as he reads. But perhaps it is fair, and this is sometimes forgotten, to suppose that a translation is intended only for such as have no knowledge of the original, and to whom it will be a new poem. If that be so, there can be no question that a free reproduction, a transfusion into the moulds of another language, with an absolute deference to its associations, whether of the ear or of the memory, is the true method. There are no more masterly illustrations of this than the versions from the Greek, Persian, and Spanish of the late Mr. Fitzgerald. His translations, however else they may fail, make the same vivid impression on us that an original would. He has aimed at translating the genius, in short, letting all else take care of itself, and has succeeded. Chapman aimed at the same thing, and I think has also succeeded. You all remember Keats’s sonnet on first looking in his Homer. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.”