to earth, endowed with all manner of goddess-like perfections?
To the beauty of inanimate nature, the poet has added even in a still more plain and indisputable manner. He has filled the landscape with beauties in fact invisible, save to the mind, but which have become inseparably blended with the visible object. The lake, the wood, the stream, are not only beautiful in form, and colour, and motion, they have been invested by the poet with whatever is gentle, or solemn, or attractive in human affections. Scarcely can we say it is an inanimate creation we gaze upon, so much has he infused of the life, of the soul of man—so much of peace and repose—so much of passion and dignity, and of boundless aspiration. Nature and the poet now halve the work between them. Nor is it only what is extolled as exquisite scenery which echoes back to us the sentiments of the human being—nor is any voyage necessary in search of the picturesque or the gigantic, in order to experience this power which the material world has acquired from its imaginative inhabitants. This influence is felt in the simplest landscape—in the tree, the meadow, the stream—wherever, beneath an open sky, nature shoots her green or pours her rivers. The bland and elevating influence which rural scenes exert, is a common topic of remark. They do exert this influence, but it is after the poet has been there. The rustic who, if having open eyes and living in the open air were enough, communes perpetually with nature, knows nothing of an influence which, to the educated man, seems to flow so directly from the scene.
Let such considerations as these conciliate those who do not intend, whatever we or others may say, to open again their books of poetry: though resolute not to read, they may at least be not unwilling that such a species of literature should be written and read by others.
LITERARY FABLES.
FROM THE SPANISH OF YRIARTE.
The fables of Yriarte are held in high estimation by his own country-men, and have been successfully translated into most of the languages of Europe. Their reputation is well merited; for they possess, in an eminent degree, the essential qualities that characterise this class of compositions, and are scarcely inferior even to those of La Fontaine himself in sprightliness of narrative, justness of moral, and natural grace and facility of expression. But they differ from every other collection of fables in the singularity of their application, which is wholly confined to literary matters; and their interest is greatly enhanced by the variety of their versification—a circumstance to which Yriarte refers with much complacency in his preface, where he mentions that the sixty-seven fables of which his volume consists, comprise "forty different kinds of metre." In this respect I have, to a certain extent, followed his example; for, without attempting to imitate the peculiar measures of Spanish poesy, I have studiously adopted various forms of verse, instead of restricting myself, after the common fashion of English fabulists, to the monotony of the octosyllabic.
The reader who may be acquainted with the Spanish text, will find that, with few exceptions, the following translations have been executed with perhaps as much fidelity as was compatible with the endeavour to render them poetically. In some half dozen instances, where the originals possessed little interest in their subject, and were only remarkable for elegance of style or harmony of numbers, I felt compelled to take a greater license. To translate them literally, was, literally, to traduce them. Their native delicacy seemed necessarily to evaporate in the process; and, like the pure wines of their own country, which will not bear to be exported until they
