the
inspiration of a sense of the beautiful. The enjoyment of a thought is
partly an intellectual enjoyment; you may even reason yourself into it;
but the enjoyment of style and language is purely an aesthetic enjoyment,
susceptible, indeed, of culture, but springing from an inborn sense of
harmony. To extend this enjoyment to a foreign language, you must bring
that language close to you, and form with it those intimate relations
between thought and word which you have formed in your own. The word
must not only suggest the thought, but become a part of it, as the
painting becomes a part of the canvas. It must strike your ear with a
familiar sound, awakening pleasant memories of actual life and real
scenes. Idioms are often interpreters of national life, giving you
sudden glimpses, and even deep revelations, of manners and customs, and
the circumstances whence they sprang. They are often, too, brief
formulas, condensing thought into its briefest expression, with a force
and energy which the full expression could not give. To mistake them, is
to mistake the whole passage. Not to feel them, is not to feel the most
characteristic form of thought.

The preposition _da_ is one of the most versatile words in Italian. Its
literal meaning is _from_; it is daily used to express _to_. _Da me_ may
mean _from me_: it may also mean _to me_. _Fit_ or _deserving to be
done_ is a common meaning of it; and it is in this sense that Dante uses
it in the following passage from the fourth canto of Paradiso,
fifty-fifth line:--

"Con intenzion _da_ non esser derisa,"--
With intention not (_deserving to be_) to be derided.

Cary, though a good Italian scholar, translates it _to shun derision_;
and, giving it this sense, quotes Stillingfleet to illustrate the
thought which, for want of practical familiarity with the language, he
attributes to Dante.

We believe, then, that the qualifications of a translator may be briefly
summed up under the following heads:--

He must be conscientiously truthful, studiously following his text, word
by word and line by line.

He must possess a thorough mastery over both languages, feeling as well
as understanding the words and idioms of his original.

He must possess the power of forgetting himself in his author.

And, lastly, he must be not merely a skilful artificer of verses, or a
man of poetic sensibility, but a poet in the highest and truest sense of
the word.

We would gladly enla