f I know its voyagers, eyes as lustrous,
voices as sweet. With the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free,
why should these delicious Italian pages exist but to be tortured into
grammatical examples? Is there no reward to be imagined for a
delightful book that can match Browning's fantastic burial of a tedious
one? When it has sufficiently basked in sunshine, and been cooled in
pure salt air, when it has bathed in heaped clover, and been scented,
page by page, with melilot, cannot its beauty once more blossom, and
its buried loves revive?

Emboldened by such influences, at least let me translate a sonnet, and
see if anything is left after the sweet Italian syllables are gone.
Before this continent was discovered, before English literature
existed, when Chaucer was a child, these words were written. Yet they
are to-day as fresh and perfect as these laburnum-blossoms that droop
above my head. And as the variable and uncertain air comes freighted
with clover-scent from yonder field, so floats through these long
centuries a breath of fragrance, the memory of Laura.

SONNET 129.

"Lieti fiori e felici."
O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!
'Mid which my queen her gracious footstep sets;
O plain, that keep'st her words for amulets
And hold'st her memory in thy leafy bowers!
O trees, with earliest green of spring-time hours,
And spring-time's pale and tender violets!
O grove, so dark the proud sun only lets
His blithe rays gild the outskirts of your towers!
O pleasant country-side! O purest stream,
That mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,
And of their living light can catch the beam!
I envy you her haunts so close and dear.
There is no rock so senseless but I deem
It burns with passion that to mine is near.

Goethe compared translators to carriers, who convey good wine to
market, though it gets unaccountably watered by the way. The more one
praises a poem, the more absurd becomes one's position, perhaps, in
trying to translate it. If it is so admirable--is the natural
inquiry,--why not let it alone? It is a doubtful blessing to the human
race, that the instinct of translation still prevails, stronger than
reason; and after one has once yielded to it, then each untranslated
favorite is like the trees round a backwoodsman's clearing, each of
which stands, a silent defiance, until he has cut it down. Let us try
the axe again. This is to La