"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."


But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating
funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes -


"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."


Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what
of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add
that the ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts DO
gibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton,
Broome, and Co., make them howl.

No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The
following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet,
may be left unsigned -


"Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your
sin
Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome
therein;
And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men
are wet,
And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the
gateway are met,