ABSTRACT
That servile path thou nobly dost decline Of tracing word by word and line by line. Those are the laboured births of slavish brains; Not the effects of poetry, but pains; Cheap, vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words. A new and nobler way thou dost pursue To make translations and translators too. They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame; True to his sense, but truer to his fame; Fording his current, where thou find’st it low, Let’st in thine own to make it rise and flow; Wisely restoring whatsoever grace It lost by change of times, or tongues, or place; Nor fettered to his numbers and his times,2
Betray’st his music to unhappy rhymes; Nor are the nerves3 of his compacted strength Stretched and dissolved into unsinewed length; Yet after all, lest we should think it thine, Thy spirit to his circle dost confine. New names, new dressings, and the modern cast, Some scenes, some persons altered, had outfaced4
The world it were thy work; for we have known Some thanked and praised for what was less their own. That master’s hand which to the life can trace The airs, the lines, and features of a face, May with a free and bolder stroke express A varied posture or a flattering dress; He could have made those like, who made the rest, But that he knew his own design was best.
