n the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;
The rest my women bore me in my house.
The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd;
And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs,
Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country,
Hector; and for his sake am I come here
To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.
But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think
Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:
For I am much more wretched, and have borne
What never mortal bore, I think on earth,
To lift unto my lips the hand of him
Who slew my boys.'

He ceased; and there arose
Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
Put him away; for both shed tears to think
Of other times; the one most bitter ones
For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
Lay right before Achilles: and the other,
For his own father now, and now his friend;
And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.
But when divine Achilles had refresh'd
His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left
His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took
Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.

_Iliad_, xxiv. 468.

O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand
out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our
eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man
of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if
he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are
necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact.
They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be
kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without
feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without
imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their
kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been
encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative
would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too
much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes;
the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those.
We should have been told nothing of the 'grey chin', of the house
hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently