3. Genesis.: 34
"That with heart-weariness and mournful breast
Full many sighs may furnish anxious food."
35 The writer makes "cherubim" - or "cherubin" - singular. I have therefore retained his mistake. What the "hot point" - "calidus apex" - is, is not clear. It may be an allusion the "flaming sword" (see Gen. iii. 24); or it may mean the top of the flame.
36 Or, "origins" - "orsis" - because Cain and Abel were original types, as it were, of two separate classes of men.
37 "Perpetuo;" "in process of time," Eng. ver.; meq hmeraj, LXX. in Gen. iv. 3.
38 Quae porsata fuerant. But, as Wordsworth remarks on Gen. iv., we do not read that Caïn's offerings were first-fruits even.
39 Quod propter gelida Cain incanduit ira. If this, which is Oehler's and Migne's reading, be correct, the words gelida and incanduit seem to be intentionally contrasted, unless incandescere be used here in a supposed sense of "growing white," "turning pale." Urere is used in Latin of heat and cold indifferently. Calida would, of course, be a ready emendation; but gelida has the advantage of being far more startling.
1 The reader is requested to bear in mind, in reading this piece, tedious in its elaborate struggles after effect, that the constant repetitions of words and expressions with which his patience will be tried, are due to the original. It was irksome to reproduce them; but fidelity is a translator's first law.
3 Helicon is not named in the original, but it seems to be meant.
4 i.e., in another clime or continent. The writer is (or feigns to be) an African. Helicon, of course, is in Europe.