f Euripides (that woman-hater as he is called!) becomes the loveliest
female creation in the Greek drama.
[11] i. e. Castor and Pollux are transferred to the stars, Hercules to
Olympus, for their deeds on earth.
[12] Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iii, p. 47.
[13] Literally "Nierensteiner,"--a wine not much known in England,
and scarcely--according to our experience--worth the regrets of its
respectable owner.
[14] In Schiller the eight long lines that conclude each stanza of
this charming love-poem, instead of rhyming alternately as in the
translation, chime somewhat to the tune of Byron's Don Juan--six lines
rhyming with each other, and the two last forming a separate couplet.
In other respects the translation, it is hoped, is sufficiently close
and literal.
[15] The peach.
[16] Sung in "The Parasite," a comedy which Schiller translated from
Picard--much the best comedy, by the way, that Picard ever wrote.
[17] The idea diffused by the translator through this and the preceding
stanza is more forcibly condensed by Schiller in four lines.
[18] "And ere a man hath power to say, "behold,"
The jaws of Darkness do devour it up,
So quick bright things come to confusion."--
SHAKESPEARE.
[19] The three following ballads, in which Switzerland is the scene,
betray their origin in Schiller's studies for the drama of William Tell.
[20] The avalanche--the equivoque of the original, turning on the Swiss
word Lawine, it is impossible to render intelligible to the English
reader. The giants in the preceding line are the rocks that overhang the
pass which winds now to the right, now to the left, of a roaring stream.
[21] The Devil's Bridge. The Land of Delight (called in Tell "a serene
valley of joy") to which the dreary portal (in Tell the black rock gate)
leads, is the Urse Vale. The four rivers, in the next stanza, are the
Reus, the Rhine, the Tessin, and the Rhone.
[22] The everlasting glacier. See William Tell, act v, scene 2.
[23] This has been paraphrased by Coleridge.
[24] Ajax the Less.
[25] Ulysses.
[26] Achilles.
[27] Diomed.
[28] Cassandra.
[29] It may be scarcely necessary to treat, however briefly, of the
mythological legend on which this exquisite elegy is founded; yet we
venture to do so rather than that the forgetfulness of the reader should
militate against his enjoyment of the poem. Proserpine, according to the
Homeride (for the story is not witho
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