ers, have added something to my own acquaintance with the studies most favored by Schiller, as well as with the subtleties of the language he employs. They have added, also, something of more familiar practice in poetical composition; and hence, whether to approach more nearly than before to the meaning of the original, or to confer a more polished facility on my own version, many of the translations have been wholly rewritten, most of them carefully retouched. My general practice has been to translate line by line, and as literally as the transfer of thought from the verse of one language into the verse of another will permit. I have very rarely departed from this rule, except where it seemed expedient to give more distinct force to the poet's leading idea; or where, in obscurer passages, it became necessary to translate the meaning as well as the words. For it sometimes happens that a construction literally verbal may be essentially unfaithful, render the sense unintelligible, or leave it exposed to total misconception-a danger of which Schiller himself was so aware, that, in his correspondence, he takes pages to explain what he desired to imply in a line. In such more difficult passages I have diligently reconsulted the best German authorities, and I have again

to record my especial obligations to the distinguished critic to whom this translation is inscribed.

I have also for the most part adhered to the metres in the original, except where they would be unmusical to an English ear, or where they would have impressed our English associations with a sound at variance with the object of the poet.

In such variations I have sought to select the metres which Schiller might have sanctioned had he been as well acquainted with our language and its poetical forms as an English translator may presume to be.

My boldest deviation has been in the substitution of familiar modern metres for the rhymeless hexameter or pentameter which Schiller has occasionally employed, against the impulse of his better taste,1 and which, just as the German poets are recovering from a barbarous affectation that no genius could establish into lasting precedent, certain very eminent writers have sought to introduce into the English language. Monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens! I hold it a sufficient excuse for this license, in an attempt to render a German poet into English verse.

1 "I have bought Voss's translation of the Odyssey, and it is truly admirable, with the exception of the hexameters, which I cannot put up with."-SCHILLER'S Correspondence with KÖRNER.

that not even the admirable genius of Professor Longfellow, nor the exquisite sense of classic rhythm and cadence which prevades Mr. Lockhart's specimens of translation from Homer into hexameters, has been able to make pentameter or hexameter a metre popularly recognized as an English verse by our reading public.

I shall not here enforce the ordinary objection to an attempt at the adoption of classic metres; viz., the want in our modern languages of the syllabic quantity, which is of such metres the alleged fundamental law. My belief in the failure of the attempt rests upon far broader ground, and involves a difficulty which, I think, may account to the eminent writers I have referred to, if they are admired in spite of their hexameters, and not on account of them. The essential charm of verse is in its harmony with our previous associations. When we hear a rhythm that we perceive at once to be musical, it is that it strikes upon keys which we have already recognized as music. But we have no more associations with hexameters and pentameters in English verse, than Ovid and Tyrtæus would have with the rhymes of the Irish melodies. Every distinct race has its own distinct forms of verse, according to its hereditary as

sociations; and it is difficult even to give to a metre with which it is already familiar, the signification which that metre takes in another tongue. That measure which in France is dedicated to the march of the epic and the swell of the tragic rhyme, is only associated in English minds with a tripping roundelay or a jovial ballad. The peculiar characteristic of Racine in the pomp of his line, would vanish at once from an English verse of the same measure. The heroic line in one country can best be rendered by the heroic line in another. Why?-simply because the line must, in order to produce the same effect on either audience, consult the previous associations which custom has peculiarized to each. It will therefore rarely happen-when a language has made considerable progress, its poetry received form and substance, and the measures adopted by its poets have become familiar to our ears and interwoven with our notions of melody—that a new metre, wholly different in form and construction, will be permanently and popularly received. It may have its hour of fashion, like any other novelty--may please as a display of ingenuity-and, if unfortunately used by a real poet, will command its short-lived crowd of imitators; but it will more probably obstruct the poet

who employs it, in his passage to the future, than win its own way to our reluctant love. I have not, therefore, employed the spurious classical metre employed by Schiller in "The Walk" and some other poems, for the same reasons that I would not employ it in translating Ovid or Tibullus. I employ a line of that length which the best English poets of a former century adopted, when they had hexameters of pentameters to translate, but, in the poem of "The Walk," with a greater freedom of rhyme than ou own alternate elegiac quatrain or heroic couplet, be cause such freedom seemed necessitated by the quick succession of scenes presented, and the general spir it of the whole composition.

In this Edition I have retained the general arrangement adopted in the first. In the received Editions of the original, Schiller's poems are classed in three divisions, according as they were composed in the three periods, which biographers have regarded as the great epochs of his life. These divisions have not been confounded in the translation, but the order in which they are classified in the German Editions is reversed the poems composed in the periods of mature development placed first,' those written in

1 And in this division I have not given to each poem the place it