Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/87

 the man who had the warning voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer would have said, 'O for that warning voice, which John heard'—and if it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would have given us that in another sentence. The effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say, often very powerful; and it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much in the same way: Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it; but wherever it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. 'The losses of the heavens', says Horace, 'fresh moons speedily repair; we, when we have gone down where the pious Æneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus are,—''pulvis et umbra sumus'' '. He never actually says where we go to; he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where Æneas, Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to the grave, says, definitely, ἐς Ἐλύσιοv πεδιον—ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν ,—'The immortals shall send thee to the Elysian plain'; and it is not till after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed: ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς—'Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is'. Again; Horace,