You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns by living stream at eve.
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave;
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."

Such is the _stanza_ in which are written Spenser's 'Faerie Queen,'
Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' and Byron's 'Childe Harold,' and it is
the highest flight of poetry: after which comes the heroic verse, in
which we lap the heavy poems we call epic--their Latin appellation; of
these the Iliads of Homer and the AEneids of Virgil are the ever
recurring aspirations of poets doomed to fall untimely. The charm of
Homer is that it is not only a poem, but it instructs us in the
history--all that we know of it--of those prehistoric days. It is full
of ballads, which are the ground-work by which we trace the manners and
the tenets of the pagan tribes. The truth involved in 'Homer' is the
charm of his epic poem, while the falsehood involved in the 'Henriade'
of Voltaire is amply sufficient to condemn it utterly. For a specimen
let us take Pope's 'Homer,' where Hector answers Andromache's appeal to
stay and guard the walls of Troy:--

"The chief replied, 'That post shall be my care;
Nor that alone, but all the works of war;
Still foremost let me stand to guard the throne,
To save my father's honours and my own:
Yet come it will, the day decreed by Fates--
How my heart trembles whilst my tongue relates--
That day when thou, imperial Troy, must bend,
Must see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.
And yet no presage dire so wounds my mind--
My mother's death, the ruin of my kind--
As thine, Andromache, thy griefs I dread.
I see thee weeping, trembling, captive led.
In Argive looms our battles to design,
Woes--of which woes so large a part was thine;
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring
The waters from the Hypereian spring.
There, whilst you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry "Behold the Trojan Hector's wife!"
Some Argive, who shall live thy griefs to see,
Embitters thy great woe by naming me:
The thoughts of glory past and present shame,
A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name.
May I lie cold before that dreadful day,
Pressed by a load of monumenta