itself. It will be observed that,
according to the principle stated long ago, I use the words painter
and poet quite indifferently, including in our inquiry the landscape
of literature, as well as that of painting; and this the more because
the spirit of classical landscape has hardly been expressed in any
other way than by words.

Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable
circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently
characteristic of modern painting. For instance, Keats, describing a
wave breaking out at sea, says of it:--

Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.[74]

That is quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner. The idea
of the peculiar action with which foam rolls down a long, large wave
could not have been given by any other words so well as by this
"wayward indolence." But Homer would never have written, never thought
of, such words. He could not by any possibility have lost sight of
the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end of it, do
what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt
water could not be either wayward or indolent. He will call the
waves "over-roofed," "full-charged," "monstrous," "compact-black,"
"dark-clear," "violet-coloured," "wine-coloured," and so on. But
every one of these epithets is descriptive of pure physical nature.
"Over-roofed" is the term he invariably uses of anything--rock, house,
or wave--that nods over at the brow; the other terms need no
explanation; they are as accurate and intense in truth as words can
be, but they never show the slightest feeling of anything animated in
the ocean. Black or clear, monstrous or violet-coloured, cold salt
water it is always, and nothing but that.

"Well, but the modern writer, by his admission of the tinge of
fallacy, has given an idea of something in the action of the wave
which Homer could not, and surely, therefore, has made a step in
advance? Also there appears to be a degree of sympathy and feeling in
the one writer, which there is not in the other; and as it has been
received for a first principle that writers are great in, proportion
to the intensity of their feelings, and Homer seems to have no
feelings about the sea but that it is black and deep, surely in this
respect also the modern writer is the greater?"

Stay a moment. Homer _had_ some feeling about the sea; a faith in