art - these at all events, whatsoever may befall his poetic fame, are to be our inheritance forever as a people, and a compelling power unto a new birth of our American Literature.

For not to no purpose must we believe are we thus, by origin, of many nations and languages; and if America shall become in truth the cultural fulfillment of Europe's prophetic hope, she will not be a New England but a New Europe. Then the preachers and promoters of her larger National life, unto the appearance of her original seers and world-poets, will be the Translators, who make live for us, together in a social whole, the several great and noble spirits of every people, physically or spiritually ancestral to our own that is to be! Shakespeare and Milton shall have to welcome on equal terms, in this their new Empire, Dante, Molière, Goethe and a score more of their peers, "bards of passion and of mirth." And unto this consummation let the present paper be only, for aught we care if our disallower would so phrase it-the raucous crow of a cockerel on a rail fence, in the sublime face of the vast "Rose of Dawn!"

The University of the South.

WILLIAM NORMAN GUTHRIE.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AS TRANSLATOR: TWO LETTERS

The writer of the foregoing article on Translation ventured to address Mr. Rossetti for definite and irrefutable testimony on certain points in his proposed treatment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a Translator. The result was two helpful letters, which being free to use as he pleased,* he first quoted from in his text and footnotes; but upon second thought considered it fairer and more courteous to print entire, italicizing the particular parts that bear on his paper, and let the reader judge for himself, and share the writer's gratitude for Mr. Rossetti's courtesy.

* I have had the pleasure of receiving your letter of May 25, and I have written down, as within, a few observations bearing upon what you say. They are at your service, for any use to which you may care to put them. Yours very faithfully, W. M. ROSSETTI.

3 ST. EDMUND'S TERRACE. REGENT'S PARK, N. W., May 14, 1909.

DEAR SIR: There can not be any reasonable doubt that my brother saw in an edition of Leopardi, or a selection from his works, those lines, printed as being by Leopardi, and such they were as a matter of translation; and my brother, knowing nothing about the French original by Arnault, translated the lines from Leopardi's Italian, and assigned them to Leopardi. So far as I remember, he did not at any later date ascertain the fact about Arnault.

In editions of my brother's poems, published by me with notes, the fact about Arnault is mentioned.

I am not entirely sure what is signified by my brother's gift of visualization. In this present instance the only visualization which he exercised (so far as I perceive) was that he saw and read a poem printed as being Leopardi's, and not being aware of anything to the contrary, he translated it, and brought out his translation as being done from Leopardi.

Believe me, dear Sir,

Very faithfully yours,

WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI.

W. M. ROSSETTI'S NOTES.

A poet who is said to "visualize" a thing or an event is thereby (as I understand it) said to have before his mind's eye a clear, concrete image of the thing or event. I have not the slightest doubt that Dante Rossetti possessed and constantly exercised this faculty, and all the more so as being a painter as well as a poet. I think he must have exercised the faculty in relation to poems which he translated just as much as in relation to poems of his own original composition. To take an instance: When he set about translating Dante's canzone (in the Vita Nova) narrating his vision of the death of Beatrice, I think Rossetti must have had before his mind's eye a perfectly clear presentment of the personages and circumstances as set forth by Dante - a presentment of them not the less distinct

than when he later on undertook to show the same subjectmatter in a picture. Beyond this, he must have visualized - i. e. realized to himself - Dante's attitude of mind and feeling in writing the canzone; but, if it is suggested that he realized to himself something developing Dante's mind and feeling beyond what is embodied in the Italian canzone, I am not prepared to adopt that view. To my thinking, it remains in the region of the uncertain and the nebulous.

Rossetti began writing original verse towards the age of six of course, then and for some years ensuing, very childish or boyish stuff. By the age of eighteen he wrote original verse of exceptional force and artistic beauty-witness My Sister's Sleep, and more especially The Blessed Damozel. Before this age he had made some verse translations, all or most from the German: the opening books of the Nibelungen Lied, Bürger's Lenore, and (possibly before The Blessed Damozel), er Arme Heinrich (whom he called Henry the Leper). His translations from the Italian (from Dante and from poets preceding or nearly contemporaneous with him) began early; much about the same time as The Blessed Damozel, or before the summer of 1847. For some years ensuing, original composition and translating proceeded pari passu; the latter however being much the larger in quantity. After 1853, or so, he did but little translating. The translations from Villon, and the one from verses which he found in Leopardi, may have been done in 1869-70. I am quite satisfied that, when he was doing the Leopardi, he had no knowledge of any French original by Arnault; and I am unable to follow the suggestion that he in any way divined points in Arnault's poem not reproduced in Leopardi's version. I have found evidence to show, at a later date, he knew about Arnault; but this does not affect any question relating to the translation which Rossetti made.

As to "the relation between his activity as a translator and the nature of his original creation as a poet," I can say this much: In his original poetry we all, I suppose, recognize a large amount of pictorial or picturesque coloring, and a tone of mind and of expression at once romantic and introspective. In his translations the same qualities do unquestionably appear.

He gets into the translations more of these qualities than he finds in the poems translated from. I have lately had occasion to put this point to the test; for an edition has been published containing the text of those early Italian poems, along with his versions of them, and I went through the book with a good deal of pains. My primary object was to trace the instances in which he had misapprehended the sense of the Italian, or had departed very widely from an exact rendering of it; and I wrote out those details, and also noted some of the more conspicuous cases in which he had infused into the compositions a more pictorial or romantic hue. I sent my notes to the publisher of the volume, and they will, I believe, be published in it, in the event of a second edition.

Rossetti's original writings are there to speak for themselves, and any intelligent inquirer can form his own opinions as to the tone and faculties of mind traceable in them. I don't think that in his letters, etc., he has left much that would tend to elucidate such a point. In Hall Caine's Recollections of D. G. Rossetti a letter of his is quoted (p. 134), speaking of how he wrote his prose tale Hand and Soul in one night, and of the peculiar sensations proper to nightly composition. In his Family-Letters (p. 384), he says, as to a conjecture of his on an unimportant subject: "But this is all mere mental drama." There is another letter of his, but I cannot at the moment remember where it is to be found, in which he speaks of "doing a deal of mental cartooning," or some such phrase.

WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI.

THE LAST OF THE GREAT POETS

England is rich in accomplished writers of verse: Thomas Hardy, Dobson, Watson, and Kipling; or, of highest promise in a younger school, Phillips and Noyes, but none equals in power, or in volume, or in the splendor of his general achievement, the late Algernon Charles Swinburne, who sleeps to-day in the little yard of St. Boniface, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. This one may have a sweet note, and that other the authentic touch of passion, but it was in Swinburne alone that all the qualities of poetic greatness were combined. None of his contemporaries, yet living, pursues the poetic calling with so sincere and brilliant an allegiance to the claims of absolute and unadulterated poetry. Swinburne's was a solitary preeminence unparalleled in modern letters.

It is in this regard that one thinks of him as last of the great poets of that great era which we call Victorian, when poets heads reached higher above the crowd than any now. Of them he surely was in his splendid work, while, obviously and literally, was he with them in point of time. When he was born, in London, on the fifth of April, 1837, Southey had yet six years to live, Wordsworth a baker's dozen, Moore two more than Wordsworth, and Walter Savage Landor over a quarter of a century. William Morris was three in that accession year; Christine Rossetti was seven, and her more famous brother, Dante Gabriel, nine. Tennyson was then midway through that fallow time which lay between the poems of 1830 and those of '42, and less than a month after Swinburne's appearance in the world Browning's Stratford was put on the stage by Macready at Covent Garden. When Swinburne, then living with the brothers Rossetti at Queen's House, Chelsea, was publishing (1860) his initial dramas of The Queen Mother and Rosamund, Mrs. Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough were yet living and writing, though each was to lay by the pen in less than a twelve-month. The Atalanta in Calydon appeared in types only a year later than Browning's Dramatis Persona. When the Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866, leading not only to the author's "discovery" but to his de