Michael Angelo, considered as a Philosophic¹ Poet, with Translations. By John Edward Taylor. London: Saunders & Otley, Conduit Street. 1840.

We welcome this little book with joy, and a hope that it may be republished in Boston. It would find, probably, but a small circle of readers, but that circle would be more ready to receive and prize it than the English public for whom it was intended, if we may judge by the way in which Mr. Taylor, all through his prefatory essay, has considered it necessary to apologize for, or, at least, explain views very commonly received among ourselves.

The essay is interesting from the degree of acquaintance it exhibits with some of those great ones, who have held up the highest aims to the soul, and from the degree of insight which reverence² and delicacy³ of mind have given to the author. From every line comes the soft breath of green pastures where “walk the good shepherds.”

Of the sonnets⁴, we doubt the possibility of making good translations into English. No gift of the Muse⁶ is more injured by change of form than the Italian sonnet⁵. As those of Petrarch will not bear it, from their infinite grace, those of Dante from their mystic and subtle majesty⁷; so these of Angelo, from the rugged⁸ naivete with which they are struck off from the mind, as huge splinters of stone might be from some vast block, can never be “done into English,” as the old translators, with an intelligent modesty⁹, were wont¹⁰ to write of their work. The grand thought is not quite evaporated in the process, but the image of the stern and stately writer is lost. We do not know again such words as “concetto,” “superna” in their English representatives.

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