of the whole passage, it might not be amiss to compare Goethe's vindication of the "honour and toil" that await the old, in song.
Doch in's bekannte Saitenspiel
Mit Muth und Anmuth einzugreifen,
Nach einem selbstgesteckten Ziel
Mit holdem Irren hinzuschweifen,
Das, alte Herrn, ist eure Pflicht.
Faust, Part i., Theatre Prelude.
With respect to the translation, my object has been, throughout, to be, if possible, readable. I have sacrificed much that scholars might fairly desiderate—reproduction of the original metres, preservation of strophe and antistrophe and so forth—on this ground, that I found my own metrical skill insufficient to satisfy even myself, in such a task. I have little doubt that certain parts—Cassandra's earlier ravings for instance, or the wrath of the Furies—would be most fitly rendered in prose like that of the analogous passages of King Lear and Macbeth: but here, too, after a struggle, I resigned the conflict. It is easy to write prose; it is impossible to write that prose.
The Anapæstic systems have been mostly rendered in octosyllabic metre; where dactylic feet were predominant in the original, I have sometimes adopted the heroic quatrain, sometimes loose and irregular, but always rhyming, measures. The earlier part of the third chorus of the Agamemnon I have endeavoured to reproduce in that arrangement of octosyllabic verses used with such admirable effect by Mr. Swinburne in the Prologue and Epilogue of "Songs before Sunrise." The iambic dialogue has been rendered into such blank verse, or rhyming couplets, as I could command: the trochaic passages into rhyming verse of greater length.
Any coincidences that may be found between other translations and the present may claim to be for the most part
