Sat chanting there; a grove on either side,
  Alder and poplar, and the redolent branch
  Wide-spread of cypress, skirted dark the cave
  Where many a bird of broadest pinion built
  Secure her nest, the owl, the kite, and daw,
  Long-tongued frequenters of the sandy shores. 
  A garden vine luxuriant on all sides
  Mantled the spacious cavern, cluster-hung
  Profuse; four fountains of serenest lymph,
  Their sinuous course pursuing side by side,
  Strayed, all around, and everywhere appeared
  Meadows of softest verdure purpled o’er
  With violets; it was a scene to fill
  A God from heaven with wonder and delight.

There are faults in this and even blunders, notably in the natural history; and “serenest lymph” is a sad departure from Homeric simplicity.  Still on the whole the passage in the translation charms, and its charm is tolerably identical with that of the original.  In more martial and stirring passages the failure is more signal, and here especially we feel that if Pope’s rhyming couplets are sorry equivalents for the Homeric hexameter, blank verse is superior to them only in a negative way.  The real equivalent, if any, is the romance metre of Scott, parts of whose poems, notably the last canto of Marmion and some passages in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, are about the most Homeric things in our language.  Cowper brought such poetic gifts to his work that his failure might have deterred others from making the same hopeless attempt.  But a failure his work is; the translation is no more a counterpart of the original, than the Ouse creeping through its meadows is the counterpart of the Aegean rolling before a fresh wind and under a bright sun.  Pope delights school-boys; Cowper delights nobody, though on the rare occasions when he is taken from the shelf, he commends himself, in a certain measure, to the taste and judgment of cultivated men.

In his translations of Horace, both those from the Satires and those from the Odes, Cowper succeeds far better.  Horace requires in his translator little of the fire which Cowper lacked.  In the Odes he requires grace, in the Satires urbanity and playfulness, all of which Cowper had in abundance.  Moreover, Horace is separated from us by no intellectual gulf.  He belongs to what Dr. Arnold called the modern period of ancient history.  Nor is Cowper’s translation of part of the eighth book of Virgil’s Aeneid bad, in spite of the heaviness of the blank verse.  Virgil, like Horace, is within his intellectual range.

As though a translation of the whole of the Homeric poems had not been enough to bury his finer faculty, and prevent him from giving us any more of the minor poems, the publishers seduced him into undertaking an edition of Milton, which was to eclipse all its predecessors in splendour.  Perhaps he may have been partly entrapped by a chivalrous desire to rescue his idol from the disparagement cast on it by the tasteless and illiberal Johnson.  The project after weighing on his mind and spirits for some time was abandoned, leaving as its traces only translations of Milton’s Latin poems, and a few notes on Paradise Lost, in which there is too much of religion, too little of art.