_
Who, by his all-commanding might,
Did fill the new-made world with light;
_For his mercies aye endure,_
_Ever faithful, ever sure._
verses yet further weakened by the late Sir William Baker for
"Hymns Ancient and Modern."
It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as little above
those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of those of Tate and
Brady: for Milton made them at fifteen years old, and he who
afterwards consecrated his youth to poetry soon learned to know
better. And yet, bearing in mind the passages in "Paradise Lost"
and "Paradise Regained" which paraphrase the Scriptural
narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though as an
artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite won to
_knowing_ the simple fact that the thing had already been done
and surpassingly well done: he, who did so much to liberate
poetry from rhyme--he--even he who in the grand choruses of
"Samson Agonistes" did so much to liberate it from strict metre
never quite realised, being hag-ridden by the fetish that rides
between two panniers, the sacred and the profane, that this
translation of "Job" already belongs to the category of poetry,
_is_ poetry, already above metre, and in rhythm far on its way to
the insurpassable.
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