If your Homers talk in their sleep, and your Herculeses kill flies with their clubs--if every one who knows how to give vent to his portion of sorrow in dreary Alexandrines, interprets that as a call to Helicon, shall we northerns be blamed for tinkling the Muses' lyre?--Your matadors claim to have coined silver when they have stamped their effigy on wretched pewter; and at Tobolsko coiners are hanged. 'Tis true that you may often find paper-money amongst us instead of Russian roubles, but war and hard times are an excuse for anything. Go forth then, Siberian anthology! Go! Thou wilt make many a coxcomb happy, wilt be placed by him on the toilet-table of his sweetheart, and in reward wilt obtain her alabaster, lily-white hand for his tender kiss. Go! thou wilt fill up many a weary gulf of ennui in assemblies and city-visits, and may be relieve a Circassienne, who has confessed herself weary amidst a shower of calumnies. Go! thou wilt be consulted in the kitchens of many critics; they will fly thy light, and like the screech-owl, retreat into thy shadow. Ho, ho, ho! Already I hear the ear-cracking howls in the inhospitable forest, and anxiously conceal myself in my sable. FOOTNOTES: [14] In Schiller the eight long lines that conclude each stanza of this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan--six lines rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet. In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently close and literal. [15] The peach. [16] Sung in "The Parasite," a comedy which Schiller translated from Picard--much the best comedy, by the way, that Picard ever wrote. [17] The idea diffused by the translator through this and the preceding stanza is more forcibly condensed by Schiller in four lines. [18] "And ere a man hath power to say, 'behold,' The jaws of Darkness do devour it up, So quick bright things come to confusion."-- SHAKESPEARE. [19] The three following ballads, in which Switzerland is the scene, betray their origin in Schiller's studies for the drama of William Tell. [20] The avalanche--the equivoque of the original, turning on the Swiss word Lawine, it is impossible to render intelligible to the English reader. The giants in the preceding line are the rocks that overhang the pass which winds now to the right, now to the left, of a roaring stream. [21] The Devil's Bridge. The Land of Delight (called in Tell "a serene valley of joy") to which the dreary portal (in Tell the black rock gate) leads, is the Urse Vale. The four rivers, in the next stanza, are the Reus, the Rhine, the Tessin, and the Rhone. [22] The everlasting glacier. See William Tell, act v, scene 2. [23] This has been paraphrased by Coleridge. [24] Ajax the Less. [25] Ulysses. [26] Achilles. [27] Diomed. [28] Cassandra.