onfusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment, but in three lines he
lays the wounded hero under a tree, he brings a dear friend to his side,
and we refresh ourselves in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken
out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool
air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for
anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle,
but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and
he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very
battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than
increase the human horror. In the magnificent scene, where Achilles,
weary with slaughter, pauses on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry
river god, whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells up
to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the supernatural are so
strangely blended, that when Poseidon lights the forest, and god meets
god and element meets element, the convulsion is too tremendous to
enhance the fierceness of Achilles; it concentrates the interest on
itself, and Achilles and Hector, flying Trojan and pursuing Greek, for
the time melt out and are forgotten.

We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no
softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is
stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible,
because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against
what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the
stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero
meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine
punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has
been slowly and awfully gathering.

With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the
conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from
two modern poets--one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his
life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two
has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies,
in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.

The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died
lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such
thoug