own a wide penumbra of
meaning which does not belong to the word lost. [35] By its diffuse
connotations the word smarrita calls up in our minds an adequate picture
of the bewilderment and perplexity of one who is lost in a trackless
forest. The high-road with out, beaten hard by incessant overpassing
of men and beasts and wheeled vehicles, gradually becomes metamorphosed
into the shady lane, where grass sprouts up rankly between the ruts,
where bushes encroach upon the roadside, where fallen trunks now and
then intercept the traveller; and this in turn is lost in crooked
by-ways, amid brambles and underbrush and tangled vines, growing
fantastically athwart the path, shooting up on all sides of the
bewildered wanderer, and rendering advance and retreat alike hopeless.
No one who in childhood has wandered alone in the woods can help feeling
all this suggested by the word smarrita in this passage. How bald
in comparison is the word lost, which might equally be applied to a
pathway, a reputation, and a pocket-book! [36] The English is no doubt
the most copious and variously expressive of all living languages, yet
I doubt if it can furnish any word capable by itself of calling up the
complex images here suggested by smarrita. [37] And this is but one
example, out of many that might be cited, in which the lack of exact
parallelism between the two languages employed causes every translation
to suffer.

[35] See Diez, Romance Dictionary, s. v. "Marrir."

[36] On literally retranslating lost into Italian, we should get
the quite different word perduta.

[37] The more flexible method of Dr. Parsons leads to a more
satisfactory but still inadequate result:--

"Half-way on our life's Journey, in a wood,
From the right path I found myself astray."

All these, however, are difficulties which lie in the nature of
things,--difficulties for which the translator is not responsible; of
which he must try to make the best that can be made, but which he can
never expect wholly to surmount. We have now to inquire whether there
are not other difficulties, avoidable by one method of translation,
though not by another; and in criticizing Mr. Longfellow, we
have chiefly to ask whether he has chosen the best method of
translation,--that which most surely and readily awakens in the reader's
mind the ideas and feelings awakened by the original.

The translator of a poem may proceed upon either of two distinct
principles. In th