Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/126

96 legends of the glorious Ionian verse were recited Its direct and joyous motive. for the delight of telling and hearing; that the unresting, untiring, billowy hexameters were intoned with the unction of the bard; that they do convey the ancestral reverence, the religion, the ethics, of those adventurous dædal Greeks, but simply as a consequence of their spontaneous truth and vitality. Their poets sang with no more casuistic purpose than did the nightingales in the grove of Colonos. Hence their directness, and their unconscious transmission of the Hellenic system of government and worship. If you wish instruction, everything is essentially natural and true. A perfect transcript of life—the best of teachers—is before us. In the narrative books of the Bible the good and bad appear without disguise. All is set forth with the frankness that made the heart of the Hebrew tent-dweller the heart of the world thereafter. In Homer, the deities are dramatis personæ, very human, with sovereign yet terrestrial passions; they dwell like feudal lords, slightly above their dependents, alternating between contempt for them and interest in their affairs. But Immortal songs that lure us "out of thought." where is the healthy man or boy who reads these epics without an absorption in their poetry and narrative that is the clew to their highest value? I have little patience with the critics who would disillusionize us. What is the use of poetry? Why not, in this workaday world, yield ourselves to its enjoyment? Homer