s of crime. The history of mankind is
not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the
record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung
historically we know nothing literal at all--not any names of any kings,
of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all
gone--dead--passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the
tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which
historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as
the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said,
there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps,
than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the
brilliant days of Pericles, or of the Caesars, to construct a history of
another kind--a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang,
but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought,
talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in
it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and
servants; rich and poor--we have it all delineated in the marvellous
verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest
which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little
enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an
Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character
than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so
living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of
disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous
property of verse--one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse
any superstition on the origin of language--that the metrical and
rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express
back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with
all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all
other outward things in which human hearts take interest--to produce
them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the
same emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.
The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative
power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the
same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in
outward phenomena. Whatever be the caus