dy are developed,
especially as in Assyria and Egypt, and by the remarkable discoveries
of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik and in Greece. But the appreciation of
him as a poet has never failed, though it is disappointing to find
that a man so great as Aristophanes should describe him simply as the
bard of battles, and sad to think that in many of the Christian
centuries his works should have slumbered without notice in hidden
repositories. His place among the greatest poets of the world, whom no
one supposes to be more than three or four in number, has never been
questioned. Considering him as anterior to all literary aids and
training, he is the most remarkable phenomenon among them all. It may
be well to specify some of the points that are peculiarly his own. One
of them is the great simplicity of the structure of his mind. With an
incomparable eye for the world around him in all things, great and
small, he is abhorrent of everything speculative and abstract, and
what may be called philosophies have no place in his works, almost the
solitary exception being that he employs thought as an illustration of
the rapidity of the journey of a deity. He is, accordingly, of all
poets the most simple and direct. He is also the most free and genial
in the movement of his verse; grateful nature seems to give to him
spontaneously the perfection to which great men like Virgil and
Milton had to attain only by effort intense and sustained. In the high
office of drawing human character in its multitude of forms and colors
he seems to have no serious rival except Shakespeare. We call him an
epic poet, but he is instinct from beginning to end with the spirit of
the drama, while we find in him the seeds and rudiments even of its
form. His function as a reciting minstrel greatly aided him herein.
Again, he had in his language an instrument unrivalled for its
facility, suppleness, and versatility, for the large range of what
would in music be called its register, so that it embraced every form
and degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them
all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most
intense and concentrated, in the dress of exactly appropriate style
and language. His metre also is a perfect vehicle of the language. If
we think the range of his knowledge limited, yet it was all that his
country and his age possessed, and it was very greatly more than has
been supposed by readers that dwelt only on the