e is no person
so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a
looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.
But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the
poet's art as with the sculptor's--sandstone will not carve like marble,
its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The
actions of men, if they are true, noble, and genuine, are strong enough
to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they
crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.

What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we
intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to
be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned
mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than
prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line,
and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by
accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on,
to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were
familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which
will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the
'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the
belief in progress.

We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the
race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern
Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under
Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of
its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the
Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest
senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is
owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and
in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the
contemporary periods in the other people of the earth, as a kind of
childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events,
as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own,
to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or
less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men
are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is
not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time,