Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/138

128 gard as merely human. There are, indeed, other recorded utterances to which the song of Homer, unlike as it is, has yet wonderful points of resemblance. For the student of Scripture, the prince of heathen poets possesses a special interest. It is quite unnecessary to insist upon the actual connection which some enthusiastic champions of sacred literature have either traced or fancied between the lays of the Greek bard and the inspired records of the chosen people. Whether the Hebrew chronicles, in any form, could have reached the eye or ear of the poet in his many wanderings is, to say the least, extremely doubtful. But Homer bears an independent witness to the truth and accuracy of the sacred narrative, so far as its imagery and diction are to be taken into account, which is very remarkable and valuable. Allowing for the difference in the local scenery, the reader of the Iliad may well fancy at times that he is following the night-march of Abraham, the conquests of Joshua, or the wars of the Kings; while in the Odyssey the same domestic interiors, the same primitive family life, the same simple patriarchal relations between the king or chief of the tribe and his people, remind us in every page of the fresh and living pictures of the book of Genesis. Fresh and living the portraits still are, in both cases, after the lapse of so many centuries, because in both the writers drew faith-fully from what was before their eyes, without any straining after effect—without any betrayal of that self-consciousness which spoils many an author's best work, by forcing his own individuality upon the reader in-stead of that of the scenes and persons whom he repre-