recourse to blank verse; but then blank verse must de-Cowperise itself, must get rid of the habits of stiff self-retardation which make it say ‘Not fewer shone,’ for ‘So many shone.’ Homer moves swiftly: blank verse can move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as
A thousand fires were burning, and by each . . .
is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease: blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of
Came they not over from sweet Lacedæmon . . .
is ungainly. Homer’s expression of his thought is simple as light: we know how blank verse affects such locutions as
While the steeds mouth’d their corn aloof . . .
and such modes of expressing one’s thought are sophisticated and artificial.
One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator’s attention to the essential characteristics of Homer’s poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr. Spedding, recognising these characteristics as indeed Homer’s, admitting them to be essential, is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of English blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr. Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ‘must not be Mr. Tennyson’s blank
