glish:

And thou, dost thou disdain to yield thy breath,
Whose very life is little more than death?
More than one-half by lazy sleep possest,
And when awake, thy soul but nods at best,
Day-dreams and sickly thoughts revolving in thy breast.
Eternal troubles haunt thy anxious mind,
Whose cause and case thou never hopest to find,
But still uncertain, with thyself at strife,
Thou wanderest in the labyrinth of life.

Descriptive poetry also lends itself with comparative ease to
translation. Nothing can be better than the translation made by Mr.
Gladstone[36] of _Iliad_ iv. 422-32. The original Greek runs thus:

[Greek: hos d' hot' en aigialo polyechei; kyma thalasses
ornyt' epassyteron Zephyrou hypo kinesantos;
ponto men te prota koryssetai, autar epeita
cherso rhegnymenon megala bremei, amphi de t' akras
kyrton eon koryphoutai, apoptyei d' halos achnen;
hos tot' epassyterai Danaon kinynto phalanges
nolemeos polemonde. keleue de oisin hekastos
hegemonon; oi d' alloi aken isan, oude ke phaies
tosson laon hepesthai echont' en stethesin auden,
sige, deidiotes semantoras; amphi de pasi
teuchea poikil' elampe, ta eimenoi estichoonto.]

Mr. Gladstone, who evidently drew his inspiration from the author of
"Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake," translated as follows:

As when the billow gathers fast
With slow and sullen roar,
Beneath the keen north-western blast,
Against the sounding shore.
First far at sea it rears its crest,
Then bursts upon the beach;
Or with proud arch and swelling breast,
Where headlands outward reach,
It smites their strength, and bellowing flings
Its silver foam afar--
So stern and thick the Danaan kings
And soldiers marched to war.
Each leader gave his men the word,
Each warrior deep in silence heard,
So mute they marched, them couldst not ken
They were a mass of speaking men;
And as they strode in martial might
Their flickering arms shot back the light.

It is, however, in dealing with poetry which is neither didactic nor
descriptive that the difficulty--indeed often the impossibility--of
reconciling the genius of the two languages becomes most apparent. It
may be said with truth that the best way of ascertaining how a fine or
luminous idea can be presented in any particular language is to set
aside altogether the idea of transl