However, to comply with the practice of Germany, we
shall throw away a few sentences upon this, as a pure _ad libitum_
digression.

The courteous reader, whom we beg also to suppose the most ignorant of
readers, by way of thus founding a necessity and a case of philosophic
reasonableness for the circumstantiality of our own explanations, will
be pleased to understand that by ancient traditionary usage the word
_rhapsodia_ is the designation technically applied to the several books
or cantos of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' So the word _fytte_ has gained a
technical appropriation to our narrative poetry when it takes the ballad
form. Now, the Greek word _rhapsody_ is derived from a tense of the verb
_rhapto_, to sew as with a needle, to connect, and _ode_, a song, chant,
or course of singing. If, therefore, you conceive of a _rhapsodia_, not
as the _opera_, but as the _opus_ of a singer, not as the form, but as
the result of his official ministration, viz., as that section of a
narrative poem which forms an intelligible whole in itself, whilst in a
subordinate relation it is one part of a larger whole--this idea
represents accurately enough the use of the word _rhapsodia_ in the
latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word _canto_ to be taken
in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical
composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the
complexity of the idea in the word _rhapsodia_ is that both its separate
elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential;
neither is a casual, neither a subordinate, element.

Now, the 'Rhapsodoi,' as may be supposed, are the personal correlates of
the _rhapsodia._ This being the poem adapted to chanting, those were the
chanters. And the only important question which we can imagine to arise
is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the
poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We
cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered
as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible
relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung or
accompanied instrumentally could bear to the naked-speaking rehearsal of
the same poem or to the original text of that poem, ever can affect the
main question of Homer's integrity. The 'Rhapsodoi' come to be mentioned
at all simply as being one link in the transmission of the Homeric
poems. They are found