"Trois chants de l'Edda. Vaftrudnismal, Thrymsquidal, Skirnisfor, traduits
en vers français, accompagnés de notes explicatives des mythes et
allégories, et suivis d'autres poèmes par W.E. Frye, ancien major
d'infanterie au service d'Angleterre, membre de l'Académie des Arcadiens de
Rome. Se vend à Paris, pour l'auteur, chez Heideloff & Cie, Libraires, 18
Rue des Filles St. Thomas. 1844" (In 8vo, xii, 115 pp.)

At the end of that volume are translations by Major Frye of several
Northern poems--in German, Italian and English verse--from the Danish and
the Swedish; then come two sonnets in French verse, the one in honour of
Lafayette, the other about the Duke of Orléans, whose premature death he
compares with that of the Northern hero of the Edda, Balder. A part of
Frye's translation of the Edda, before appearing in book form, had been
published in _l'Echo de la Littérature et des Beaux Arts_, a periodical
edited by the Major's friend, M. de Belenet.

Frye loved poetry, though his ideas on the subject were rather those of the
eighteenth century than our own. It is interesting to find an English
officer reading Voltaire, Gessner, Ariosto, and quoting them from memory
(which explains that some of his quotations had to be corrected). The
sentimental vein of Rousseau's generation still flows and vibrates in him,
as when he says that he has never been able to read the letters of Wolmar
to St Preux in Rousseau's _Nouvelle Héloïse_ without shedding tears. German
minor poetry, now quite forgotten, attracted him almost as much as the
great pages of Schiller, Bürger, and Goethe. The Misses G. possess a
manuscript translation in three volumes, in the Major's own hand, of
Wieland's _Agathodemon_ done into English. This he evidently intended to
publish, as he had written the title-page which is worded as follows:

"Agathodemon, a philosophical romance translated from the German of Wieland