He presents to us the simplest pictures
of human life, so the child itself can understand them, and the
man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. Each
reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler
features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than
copy his similes. His more memorable passages are as naturally
bright as gleams of sunshine in misty weather. Nature furnishes
him not only with words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences
from her mint.
"As from the clouds appears the full moon,
All shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds,
So Hector, at one time appeared among the foremost,
And at another in the rear, commanding; and all with brass
He shone, like to the lightning of aegis-bearing Zeus."
He conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with
such magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it
were a message from the gods.
"While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing,
For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell;
But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal,
In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands
With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind,
And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts;
Then the Danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes,
Shouting to their companions from rank to rank."
When the army of the Trojans passed the night under arms, keeping
watch lest the enemy should re-embark under cover of the dark,
"They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war
Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them.
As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;
And all the heights, and the extreme summits,
And the wooded sides of the mountains appear; and from the
heavens an Infinite ether is diffused,
And all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart;
So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium.
A thousand fires burned on the plain, and by each
Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire;
And horses eating white barley and corn,
Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora."
The "white-armed goddess Juno," sent by the Father of gods and
men for Iris and Apollo,
"Went down the Idaean mountains to far Olympus,
As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,
There was I, and there, and remembers many things;
So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
And came to high Olympus."
His scenery is always true, and not invented. He does not leap in
imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air,
for there are very many
Shady mountains and resounding seas between.
If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do not
wonder how they got there, but accompany them step by step along
the shore of the resounding sea. Nestor's account of the march
of the Pylians against the Epeians is extremely lifelike: -
"Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator
of the Pylians,
And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue."
This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone: "A certain
river, Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene, where we
Pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot. Thence with all
haste we sped us on the morrow ere 't was noonday, accoutred for
the fight, even to Alpheus's sacred source," &c. We fancy that
we hear the subdued murmuring of the Minyas discharging its
waters into the main the livelong night, and the hollow sound of
the waves breaking on the shore, - until at length we are cheered
at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of
Alpheus.
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest
hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and
embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No
modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its
lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were
the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of
Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved
in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that
which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to
us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue
of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets
the sun in his rising.
"Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god, - all that then was, save Heaven."
So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus his Orpheus,
in the dim antiquity which preceded them. The mythological
system of the ancients, and it is still the mythology of the
moderns, the poem of mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with
their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and harmony the
architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time
when a mightier genius inhabited the earth. But, after all, man
is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakespeare; and our
language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work.
Poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that
it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but
we refer it sooner or later to some Orpheus or Linus, and after
ages to the genius of humanity and the gods themselves.
