no difficulty in translating the celebrated metaphor of Pericles[28] that “the loss of the youth of the city was as if the spring was taken out of the year,” because the beauty of the idea can in no way suffer by presenting it in English, French, or German rather than in the original Greek.  Again, to quote another instance from Latin, the fine epitaph to St. Ovinus in Ely Cathedral:  “Lucem tuam Ovino da, Deus, et requiem,” loses nothing of its terse pathos by being rendered into English.  Occasionally, indeed, the truth is forced upon us that even in prose “a thing may be well said once but cannot be well said twice” ([Greek:  to kalos eipein hapax perigignetai, dis de ouk endechetai]), but this is generally because the genius of one language lends itself with special ease to some singularly felicitous and often epigrammatic form of expression which is almost or sometimes even quite untranslatable.  Who, for instance, would dare to translate into English the following description which the Duchesse de Dino[29] gave of a lady of her acquaintance:  “Elle n’a jamais ete jolie, mais elle etait blanche et fraiche, avec quelques jolis details"?  On the whole, however, it may be said that if the prose translator is thoroughly well acquainted with both of the languages which he has to handle, he ought to be able to pay adequate homage to the genius of the one without offering undue violence to that of the other.

The case of the translator of poetry, which Coleridge defined as “the best words in the best order,” is manifestly very different.  A phrase which is harmonious or pregnant with fire in one language may become discordant, flat, and vapid when translated into another.  Shelley spoke of “the vanity of translation.”  “It were as wise (he said) to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.”

Longinus has told us[30] that “beautiful words are the very light of thought” ([Greek:  phos gar to onti idion tou nou ta kala onomata]), but it will often happen, in reading a fine passage, that on analysing the sentiments evoked, it is difficult to decide whether they are due to the thought or to the beauty of the words.  A mere word, as in the case of Edgar Poe’s “Nevermore,” has at times inspired a poet.  When Keats, speaking of Melancholy, says: 

She lives with Beauty—­Beauty that must die—­
And Joy, whose hand is ever on his lips,
Bidding adieu,

or when Mrs. Browning writes: 

                            ...  Young
    As Eve with Nature’s daybreak on her face,

the pleasure, both of sense and sentiment, is in each case derived alike from the music of the language and the beauty of the ideas.  But in such lines as

Arethusa arose from her couch of snows, etc.,

or Coleridge’s description of the river Alph running