he
question has often been asked, but I ask it again. May not _some_
translations open a door to him by which he can see them through
an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic ancient gods
walking: so that returning upon English literature he may
recognise them there, too, walking and talking in a garden of
values? The highest poetical speech of any one language defies,
in my belief, translation into any other. But Herodotus loses
little, and North is every whit as good as Plutarch.

Sigh no more, ladies; ladies, sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never

Suppose that rendered thus:

I enjoin upon the adult female population ([Greek: gynaikes]),
not once but twice, that there be from this time forward, a total
cessation of sighing. The male is, and has been, constantly
addicted to inconstancy, treading the ocean and the mainland
respectively with alternate feet.

That, more or less, is what Paley did upon Euripides, and how
would you like it if a modern Greek did it upon Shakespeare? None
the less I remember that my own first awed surmise of what Greek
might mean came from a translated story of Herodotus--the story
of Cleobis and Biton--at the tail of an old grammar-book, before
I had learnt the Greek alphabet; and I am sure that the instinct
of the old translators was sound; that somehow (as Wordsworth
says somewhere) the present must be balanced on the wings of the
past and the future, and that as you stretch out the one you
stretch out the other to strength.

X

There is no derogation of new things in this plea I make
specially to you who may be candidates in our School of English.
You may remember my reading to you in a previous lecture that
liberal poem of Cory's invoking the spirit of 'dear divine
Comatas,' that

Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

Well, I would have your minds, as you read our literature, reach
back to that Dorian shepherd through an atmosphere--his made
ours--as through veils, each veil unfolding a value. So you will
recognise how, from Chaucer down, our literature has panted after
the Mediterranean water-brooks. So through an atmosphere you will
link (let me say) Collins's "Ode to Evening," or Matthew Arnold's
"Strayed Reveller" up to the 'Pervigilium Veneris,' Mr Sturge
Moore's "Sicilian Vine-dresser" up to Theocritus, Pericles'
funeral oration down to Lincoln's over the d