Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/74

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even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more that the same poet’s descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay’s

(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all)—I say, Lord Macaulay’s

it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This ‘noble barbarian,’ this ‘savage with the lively eye,’—whose verse, Mr. Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ‘like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast,’—is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs,—narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date,—to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay; he is here as much to be distinguished from them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be