Word: liking
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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There are some translations which have almost the merit of original works, like Sir Thomas Urquhart's of Rabelais, for instance, but it is almost impossible that any foreigner should acquire that perfect intimacy with the niceties of a language which is essential to the thorough comprehension of an author and especially a poet. Both Tieck and Schlegal have mined very deep in the genius of Shakespeare, of his power and art they were among the first to form an adequate conception, and yet in their translation, where Macbeth says: "Here on this bank and shoal of Time," they give...
...utterly unlike their originals are Pope's Homer, and Hoole's Tasso, Murphy's Tacitus and Francis's Horace? The greater the author, the more he suffers, because power of expression is always a chief part of the outfit of a great author. Certain phrases may be translated, like the famous: "They make a solitude and call it peace" of Tacitus, but who ever saw a satisfactory version of the concluding paragraphs of the Life of Agricola...
...majority of books are of that exemplary kind which no gentleman's library can be without, but there is another and rarer kind without which no man's education is complete. These are the representative books in which epochs culminated like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,- or which mark the transitions of the human mind like Cervantes and Gothe. But here Nature deals kindly and mercifully with us, and it is seldom that she gives more than one great speaker or singer to one race. There is a New England proverb which says of a fastidious person-"the best is not good...
...telegraph wire to the birds that perch on it. Few men learn the highest use of books. After life-long study many a man discovers too late that to have had the philosopher's stone availed nothing without the philosopher to use it. Many a scholarly life, stretched like a talking wire to bring the wisdom of antiquity into communion with the present, can at last yield us no better news than the true accent of a Greek verse, or the translation of some filthy nothing scrawled on the walls of a brothel by some Pompeian idler...
...because the Winter Meetings are bad but because they have out lived their usefulness. When there are many forms of athletics in which students eagerly take part the attempt to continue old forms which have little to recommend them except that they were once popular,- this seems to us like throwing good effort away. The meetings which are really needed are those held out-of-doors, and we are sure that such painstaking and conscientious work as the Athletic Association officials do, will make such a meeting an entire success...