and Schlegel's German, or Hagberg's Swedish, or Foersom's Danish is no
substitute for Shakespeare. Whether or not Madhus measures up to these
is not for me to decide, but I feel very certain that he will not suffer
by comparison with the Danish versions by Wolff, Meisling, Wosemose, or
even Lembcke, or with the Norwegian versions of Hauge and Lassen. The
feeling that one gets in reading Madhus is not that he is uncouth, still
less inaccurate, but that in the presence of great imaginative richness
he becomes cold and barren. We felt it less in the tragedy of _Macbeth_,
where romantic color is absent; we feel it strongly in _The Merchant of
Venice_, where the richness of romance is instinct in every line. The
opening of the play offers a perfect illustration. In answer to
Antonio's complaint "In sooth I know not why I am so sad," etc, Salarino
replies in these stately and sounding lines:

Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies, with portly sail,--
Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,--
Do overpeer the petty traffickers
That curt'sy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.

The picture becomes very much less stately in Norwegian folk-speech:

Paa storehave huskar hugen din,
der dine langferd-skip med staute segl
som hovdingar og herremenn paa sjø
i drusteferd, aa kalle, gagar seg
paa baara millom kræmarskutur smaa',
som nigjer aat deim og som helsar audmjukt