Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[149] Palmer from the ‘Odyssey.’ These readings were given so simply, with such quiet and sustained animation, that it all seemed like an extempore performance; and all the incidents were told with such utter freshness that they might have just arrived as news by telegraph. This English text is published; it is cast, with consummate art, in a sort of rhythmic prose, perfectly simple, yet measured, and securing, perhaps, the nearest approach that can be had in English to the actual rhythm of Homer. Professor Palmer will now have to solve the further and more difficult problem, whether the stronger and richer measure of the ‘Iliad’ can be dealt with in the same way. But the work already done is one of the monumental works of American scholarship; and although it stands to the eye as a prose version, and might at first be hastily classed with a translation so incomparably inferior to it as that of Butcher and Lang, yet it is really as literal as that, while achieving at least half the interval, whatever that may be, which separates prose from poetry.

Mr. Boyesen's third great American translator is Bayard Taylor. Here again he seems