Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

Thee, goddess, thee the clouds and tempests fear,
And at thy pleasing presence disappear;
For thee the land in fragrant flowers is drest;
For thee the ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast,
And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blest.
For when the rising spring adorns the mead,
And a new scene of nature stands display'd,
When teeming buds, and cheerful greens appear,
And western gales unlock the lazy year;
The joyous birds thy welcome first express,
Whose native songs thy genial fire confess;
Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food,
Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.
All nature is thy gift; earth, air, and sea;
Of all that breathes; the various progeny,
Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.
O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain,
The leafy forest, and the liquid main,
Extends thy uncontroll'd and boundless reign;
Through all the living regions dost thou move,
And scatter'st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of love.
Since, then, the race of every living thing
Obeys thy power; since nothing new can spring
Without thy warmth, without thy influence bear,
Or beautiful or lovesome can appear;
Be thou my aid, my tuneful song inspire,
And kindle with thy own productive fire;
While all thy province, Nature, I survey,
And sing to Memmius an immortal lay
Of heaven and earth, and every where thy wondrous power display:
To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born,
Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn;
The rather then assist my muse and me,
Infusing verses worthy him and thee.
Meantime on land and sea let barbarous discord cease,
And lull the listening world in universal peace.
To thee mankind their soft repose must owe,
For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;
Because the brutal business of the war
Is managed by thy dreadful servant's care;
Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove
The pleasing pains of thy eternal love;
And panting on thy breast, supinely lies,
While with thy heavenly form he feeds his eyes.
When, wishing all, he nothing can deny,
Thy charms in that auspicious moment try;
With winning eloquence our peace implore,
And quiet to the weary world restore."

Excellent English! and excellently representative of the Latin!

Dryden sometimes estranges his language from vulgar use by a Latinism; (he, himself, insists upon this, as a deliberate act of enriching our poor and barbarous tongue;) and in his highest writings, even where he has good matter that will sustain itself at due poetical height, here and there he has touches of an ornamental, imitative, and false poetical diction. But that is not his own style – not the style which he uses where he is fully himself. This is pure English, simple, masculine; turned into poetry by a true life of expression, and by the inhering melody of the numbers. That Lucretian Exordium he must have written in one of his happiest veins – under the sting of the poetical œstrum. It is an instance where he was called to his task by desire.

In his greatest undertaking – his Translation of Virgil – he often had to write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on; and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes, when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it is not easy – when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought with his most loving and exquisite skill – wholly to shut the door of belief against the uncharitable suggestion, – that the Translator less livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical art.

The story, so marvellous and pathetic, of the Thracian harper-king, and his bride stung by the serpent, is from of old the own tale of lovers and poets. The heart of the Lover dares the terrific and unimaginable road; and the voice and hand of the Minstrel subdue all impossibilities. Virgil was fortunate in a link, which gave to his Italian Man of the Fields an interest in the antique, strange, and touching Hellenic tradition; and he has improved his opportunity worthily of his theme, of his work, and of himself. The dexterous episode of Aristæus, visited with a plague in his bee-hives, for his fault in the death of Eurydice, ends, and by ending consummates, the poem which took life in the soul of the Mincian ploughboy, and to which the chief artist of Augustan Rome was content in bequeathing the perpetual trust of his fame. Impassioned, profound tenderness, – the creating high and pure spirit of beauty – the outwardly watchful and sensitive eye and ear – with tones at will fetched by listening imagination from the great deep of the wonderful, the solemn, the sublime, – these, and crowning these, that sweet, and subtle, and rare mastery, which avails, through translucent words, to reveal quick or slow motions and varying hues of the now visible mind – which on the stream of articulate sounds rolls along, self-evolving, and changing as the passion changes, a power of music, – these all are surprisingly contained within the Seventy-Five Verses which unfold the anger of Orpheus, now a forlorn and yet powerful ghost, and of the Nymphs, once her companions, for the twice-lost Eurydice.

It is a hard but a fair trial to set the Translator against the best of his author. It is to be presumed that Dryden, matched against the best of Virgil, has done his best. We have not room for the whole diamond, but shall display one or two of the brightest facets. Who has forgotten that shrinking of the awed and tender imagination, which shuns the actual telling that Eurydice died? Which announces her as doomed to die —Moritura! then says merely that she did not see in the deep grass the huge water-snake before her feet guarding the river-bank along which she fled! and then turns to pour on the ear the clamorous wail of her companions.

"Illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina præceps,
Immanem ante pedes hydrum moritura puella
Servantem ripas altâ non vidit in herbâ."

At this first losing of Eurydice, the impetuous, wild wail of the Nymph-sisterhood may, in the verse of the Mantuan, be heard with one burst, swelling and ringing over how many hills, champaigns, and rivers!

At chorus æqualis Dryadum clamore supremos
Implerunt montes; flerunt Rhodopeiæ arces,
Altaque Pangaea, ac Rhesi Mavortia tellus,
Atque Getæ, atque Hebrus, et Actias Orithyia.

That the vivid emphasis of a stormy sorrow – given to a picture of sound in the foregoing verses, by that distinctiveness of the multitudinous repetition – declines in the melodious four English representatives to a greatly more generalized expression, must, one may think, be ascribed to Dryden's despair of reconciling in his own rougher tongue the geography and the music. Nevertheless, the version is evidently and successfully studied, to mourn and complain.

But all her fellow nymphs the mountains tear
With loud lament, and break the yielding air:
The realms of Mars remurmur all around,
And echoes to the Athenian shores resound.

It is good, but hardly reaches the purpose of the original clamour, so passionate, dirge-like, unearthly, and supernatural – at once telling the death – as they say that in some countries the king's death is never told in words, but with a clangour of shrieks only from the palace-top, which is echoed by voices to voices on to the borders of his kingdom – at once, we say, supplying this point of the relation, and impressing upon you the superhuman character of the mourners, who are able not only to deplore, but likewise mysteriously and mightily to avenge.

The next three lines are also, as might be presumed, at the height, for they describe the paragon of lovers and harpers harping his affliction of love —

Ipse cavâ solans ægrum testudine amorem,
Te dulcis conjux, te solo in litore secum,
Te veniente die, te decedente, canebat!

Musical, dolorous iteration, iteration! Musical, woe-begone iteration, iteration! What have we in English?

"The unhappy husband, husband now no more,
Did, on his tuneful harp, his loss deplore,
And sought his mournful mind with music to restore.
On thee, dear wife, in desarts all alone,
He call'd, sigh'd, sang; his griefs with day begun,
Nor were they finish'd with the setting sun."

Studied verses undoubtedly – musical, and mournful, and iterative. The two triplets of rhyme have unquestionably this meaning; and the bold choice of the homely-affectionate, "dear wife," to render the more ornate "dulcis conjux," is of a sincere simplicity, and as good English as may be. We see here a poetical method of equivalents – for "on thee he call'd, sigh'd, sang," is intended to render the urgency and incessancy of Te, Te, Te, Te! But the singular and purely Virgilian artifice of construction in the second and third line, is abandoned without hope of imitation.

Orpheus goes down into hell.

"Tænarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis,
Et caligantem nigrâ formidine lucum