and as we realise what Pindar's poetry might have been, we scarcely venture a criticism on what he has chosen that it should be.
The quality in that poetry which seems to have most impressed the ancients, is one of which a modern reader and a foreigner can scarcely judge. Nor, probably, should we be inclined to accept their estimate of its importance. They praised him chiefly as "the most sonorous of poets." [1] Such a quality was no doubt all-important as long as his poetry retained its original connection with Music and the Dance, but hardly longer; and as it must necessarily disappear in the process of translation, it cannot be a recommendation of the Odes to an English reader. Some idea, however, of Pindar's mastery over the mere form of poetry can be derived even from translations. His extraordinary rapidity in conveying his conceptions to his audience, the ingenuity with which he finds—if we may borrow an expression of his own—the shortest cut from one thought to another;—these, though they may begin by perplexing us, will assuredly end in pleasing us. Nor can we fail, in the end, to admire his fearless grasp of details from which an ordinary poet would shrink, the calm confidence with which he sets himself to present the most prosaic and unpromising facts in new and striking lights, so assured of his power to be sublime, that he has no fear of a lapse into the grotesque. We cannot but smile to hear a cloak described as "a warm specific against cold
- ↑ Athenæus Deipn. xiii. 17, and many writers in the "Anthology."
