Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/23

 would be more true to say: 'The unlikeness of Milton's manner to that of Homer is such, that no person familiar with both can read either without being struck with his difference from the other; and it is in his breaks and pauses that the English poet is most unlike the Grecian'.

The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion. Not only, for example, are these lines of Cowper un-Homeric:

So numerous seemed those fires the banks between Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece In prospect all of Troy;

where the position of the word 'blazing' gives an entirely un-Homeric movement to this simple passage, describing the fires of the Trojan camp outside of Troy; but the following lines, in that very highly-wrought passage where the horse of Achilles answers his master's reproaches for having left Patroclus on the field of battle, are equally un-Homeric:

For not through sloth or tardiness on us Aught chargeable, have Ilium's sons thine arms Stript from Patroclus' shoulders; but a God Matchless in battle, offspring of bright-haired Latona, him contending in the van Slew, for the glory of the chief of Troy.