Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[148] Bryant's translation there is substituted for the flash of lightning the very mildest moonlight; and there seems no particular reason, from anything in the tone or flavor of his narrative, why the whole series of events should not have taken place on Staten Island. Mr. Bryant undoubtedly had, in his youth, something of Longfellow's gift for translation; his early Spanish ballads had in them much promise; they were as good as Lockhart's, perhaps better. But his ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ were an old man's work, done with mechanical regularity, so many lines a day; and while they are ‘grave and dignified,’ as his critic says, they are Homer with the fire of Homer—or, in other words, with Homer himself—left out. But the real translator of the Father of Poetry is, in my judgment, one whom Mr. Boyesen does not name, and perhaps does not yet know, so recently has the first instalment of his great work appeared—Prof. G. H. Palmer. For the last half-dozen years it has been the greatest intellectual pleasure afforded by a residence near Harvard University to follow with the Greek text the public readings of Professor