If the sins of the reviewer are legion, so alas! are the provocations thereunto. It may therefore border perilously on the affected to exclaim, "Oh yes, we have been bored and bored but eccovi, here is a book that is different!" Et cetera.

However, let us risk it. Let us declare positively that this particular "Bok of Danish Verse" is different. What the exigencies of text and interpretation may have been, we do not know; we do not want to know. We know only that the translators, to summon Coleridge, "first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive," linked itself to natural poetic felicity and power. The rest, the process of gestation, the travail and torment, we prefer to surmise. For the present translators are, as they ought to be, poets--fundamentally-and poets, even the more, that they could so brood over adopted progeny as to persuade at least a second paternity. When we consider the indelible Danish bias of the original, the success of this venture is as buoyant as it is inspiring.

Every poem (the number is generous) in one way or another asserts the Dane. From Oehlenschlager, who is perhaps the most inexorably national, to Jensen, who is proudly nostalgic, the collection celebrates Denmark. Oehlenschlager sets the filial tradition. Everything must be Danish. for landscape, beech forest and the blue Sound.

There is a charming land

Where grow the wide-armed beeches

By the salt eastern Strand.

For epic characters, Northern Gods and Scandinavian heroes:

--search in the glooms

of mounded tombs,

On swords and shields

In ruined fields,

On Runic stones

Among crumbled bones.

Over the storms

The gods arise,