But the Iliad--line by
line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love.
As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of
the world to come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming
strife of this temporal world, I read and read the Iliad. Even
outwardly, it was not like other books; it was throned in towering
folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still
more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till
my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer
compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients,
set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all
to the human race--that it was history, poetry, revelation; that
the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away
like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would
endure for ever and ever.
I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to
know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks,
in the same sense as an oil-and-colour man may be said to know
something of painting; but take an untamed child, and leave him
alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will
be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; HE does
not stop in the ninth year of the siege to admire this or that
group of words; HE has no books in his tent, but he shares in vital
counsels with the "king of men," and knows the inmost souls of the
impending gods; how profanely he exults over the powers divine when
they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all,
how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of
Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful
episode of the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go
casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to
admire it.
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