for
the present discussion may be left to its special advocates. But
meanwhile our treasures are waiting for their inventory.

Literature for people of our race begins with Homer and is confined to
Europe and English America. This means in a very true sense that all the
literature which concerns us is modern, for the Greeks are the first and
perhaps the greatest of the moderns. They present us as their first
contribution the works that go under the name of Homer, and we need not
disturb ourselves now with the question whether the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey" were both written by the same man, or even each written by a
single hand. The point is that we have in them an imperishable picture
of the life of a vanished world. Each is an epic of the natural man, the
one national, the other personal. In the "Iliad" we are plunged into
the thickening close of the ten years' war between the Greeks and
Trojans, during which the beautiful cause of all the trouble, Helen,
retains all her youthful bloom and, in fact, nobody seems to grow any
older. We have a crowded stage with many episodes and interests. In the
"Odyssey" we trace the fortunes of one man, Ulysses, during his return
from the war, which occupies him ten years, so that he is away from
home, as Rip Van Winkle was, twenty years; but, instead of finding
everybody grown old or dead, as Irving's hero did, he finds his wife
still young and attractive and beset by numerous suitors. We are very
glad to have this so, because we are all children at heart and want just
such an ending. The telling of these stories, while simple, is on a
lofty plane; the gods themselves take part in the passions of the
contestants and even in the warfare. The poet, no doubt, meant this for
what it professes to be; but I cannot help seeing in the embroiling of
Olympus a perhaps unrealized tribute of the poet to the greatness of the
human soul in the scale of the universe, a suggestion that moral and
spiritual values and powers outweigh the stars in their courses.

Great as are the works of Homer, we are not to suppose them the only
masterpieces in Greek literature. Certainly the three great dramatists
cannot be omitted, all so great, yet so unlike. These three, together
with two pastoral poets, one lyric poet, and the greatest of prose
poets, are vividly pictured by Mrs. Browning in the glowing stanzas of
her "Wine of Cyprus."

Oh, our AEschylus, the thunderous!
How he drove the bolted brea