Robinson, that you wish to have the justly-celebrated "Faust" of Goethe
translated, and that some one or other of my partial friends have
induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work
adequately, those excepted, of course, whose higher power (established
by the solid and satisfactory ordeal of the wide and rapid sale of their
works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in
the development of their own intellectual organization. I return my
thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your
flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that
among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the "Louisa" of Voss,
and the "Faust" of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are
emphatically _original_ in their conception, and characteristic of a new
and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from
exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable
of either or of both into our own language.
But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not
consciously guilty, if I say that I feel two difficulties; one arising
from long disuse of versification, added to what I know, better than the
most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the
other, that _any_ work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe,
as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of
meditation on language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of
Thought with Thought, and of Thoughts as affected and modified by
Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed
faults, though with the full preknowledge that their admission would not
have offended perhaps three of all my readers, and might be deemed
Beauties by 300--if so many there were; and this not out of any respect
for the Public (_i.
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