Algernon Charles Swinburne

Excerpt from Algernon Charles Swinburne

See goodlier hounds or deadlier edge of spears; But for the end, that lies unreached at yet Between the hands and on the knees of the Gods. The effect must always be partly that of a translation even to those who are familiar with Greek religion; the words have a shade of the quality inseparable from a translation, whether it is or is not creative, for it is to be found in the Authorized Version of the Bible; the reader is a little confused and yet not unduly, when he hears of Artemis as a light for dead men and dark hours, of the fair-faced sun that kills the stars and dews and dreams and de solations of the night, for it is not English thus to collect four things of four different classes, each requiring a distinct change in the meaning of the verb which governs them all. Perhaps the reader at first accepts hidden and shown, and even the alternative pairs, roar and range, snow or sleep, favourable and fair, etc., as part of the foreignness. It does not decrease. It is not absent from.