Selection of Psalms in Verse, Poems and Translations. By Ichabod
Charles Wright and Henry Smith Wright. (Bell and Daldy.)—Father and son are the literary copareenors of this book, and the father is already known as a translator of Dante and the Iliad. He remarks with much truth that versification of the Psalms must seem presumptuous after so many failures, and half excuses his attempt by a touching reference to his recent blindness. But it must be obvious to him that the reason why all metrical versions of the Psalms must fail is that none of them can come up to the prose version. If the Psalms are super- seded by hymns, though that is contrary to the express intention of our Church, and though the hymns are altogether inferior, it is because the latter do not always remind us of an unapproachable original. We need say no more of the versified psalms in this book. But the same objection may be made to some of the translations from Horace. The ideas are generally rendered, but we miss the felicitous turns of the Latin, and Horace without his charm is Horace no longer.
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