gination
of Homer shining out in the most enlivened forms of it. We acknowledge him
the father of poetical diction; the first who taught that "language of the
gods" to men. His expression is like the colouring of some great masters,
which discovers itself to be laid on boldly, and executed with rapidity.
It is, indeed, the strongest and most glowing imaginable, and touched with
the greatest spirit. Aristotle had reason to say, he was the only poet who
had found out "living words;" there are in him more daring figures and
metaphors than in any good author whatever. An arrow is "impatient" to be
on the wing, a weapon "thirsts" to drink the blood of an enemy, and the
like, yet his expression is never too big for the sense, but justly great
in proportion to it. It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the
diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it, for in the same
degree that a thought is warmer, an expression will be brighter, as that
is more strong, this will become more perspicuous; like glass in the
furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, and refines to a greater
clearness, only as the breath within is more powerful, and the heat more
intense.

To throw his language more out of prose, Homer seems to have affected the
compound epithets. This was a sort of composition peculiarly proper to
poetry, not only as it heightened the diction, but as it assisted and
filled the numbers with greater sound and pomp, and likewise conduced in
some measure to thicken the images. On this last consideration I cannot
but attribute these also to the fruitfulness of his invention, since (as
he has managed them) they are a sort of supernumerary pictures of the
persons or things to which they were joined. We see the motion of Hector's
plumes in the epithet Korythaiolos, the landscape of Mount Neritus in that
of Einosiphyllos, and so of others, which particular images could not have
been insisted upon so long as to express them in a description (though but
of a single line) without diverting the reader too much from the principal
action or figure. As a metaphor is a short simile, one of these epithets
is a short description.

Lastly, if we consider his versification, we shall be sensible what a
share of praise is due to his invention in that also. He was not satisfied
with his language as he found it settled in any one part of Greece, but
searched through its different dialects with this particular view, to
beautify and