g toils were forfeit for a look.
Three flashes of blue lightning gave the sign
Of covenants broke, three peals of thunder join."

The falling off--the failure at the end is deplorable indeed; yet Dryden
recovers himself, and much of what follows is very fine.

The outline of the Iliad interests man's everyday heart. A wife carried
off--the retaliation--an invasion or siege--a fair captive withheld from
ransom--a displeased God sending a plague--a high prince wronged,
offended, sullenly withdrawn to his tent--war prosperous and adverse--a
dear friend lost and wailed--a general by his death reconciled--that death
avenged--a dead son redeemed by his father, and mourned by his people,--To
receive all this sufferance into the heart's depths, wants no specific
association--no grounding historical knowledge. By virtue of those
anthropical elements--which are, by a change of accidents, one to him and
you, Homer, who happens to be a Greek, makes you one, and a Trojan too, or
rather you are with him in the human regions, and that fact sufficeth for
all your soul's desires. But, though no critic, and unversed in the laws
of Epos, which by the way are only discoverable in the poem which he
created in obedience to them, and that were first revealed to him from
heaven by its inspiring genius--nevertheless, you are affected throughout
all your being by those laws, and but by them could not have been made
"greater than you know," by the Iliad. For the main action, or Achilleid,
though you may not know it, has four great steps. From Achilles' wrong by
Agamemnon to the death of Patroclus, is a movement of one tenor. From the
death of Patroclus to the death of Hector, is an entirely new movement,
though causally bound in the closest manner to that antecedent. The Games
and Funeral of Patroclus is an independent action. The Restoration of
Hector's body is a dependent, and necessarily springing action, having a
certain subsistency within itself. To the whole the seat of moving power
is the bosom of Achilles. All the parts have perfect inter-obligation. Cut
away any one, and there would be not a perilous gash, but a detruncation
fatal to the living frame. There is vital integrity from the beginning to
the end. Nowhere can you stop till the great poet stops. Then you obtain
rest--not glad rest; for say not that the Iliad ends happily. The spirit
of war sits on the sepulchral mound of Hector expecting its prey, and the
topmost towers of Il