The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his subject and himself; he is too often a common graveyard mason that would play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishment is remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhyme and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form, his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style; and here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the swiftness and the certainty of exquisite physical sensations. In such a transcript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the translator has been by. MATTHEW ARNOLD His Verse.