Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/48

32 line by line, I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love. As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of the world to come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming strife of this temporal world, I read, and read the Iliad. Even outwardly it was not like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer, compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all to the human race—that it was history—poetry—revelation—that the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever.

I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same sense as an oil-and-color-man may be said to know something of painting, but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; he does not stop in the ninth year of the siege, to admire this or that group of words—he ban no books in his tent, but he shares in vital counsels with the "King of men," and knows the inmost souls of the impending Gods; how profanely he exults over the powers divine, when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed, and mounts into Heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the 6th Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors, and masters, how best to admire it; the impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking—the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet, but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's Poetry is blazing so full upon the people, and things of the Iliad, that soon to the eyes of the child, they grow familiar as his