[ ] 74 ] [August; 



homee : a ehapsodv. 



I REMEMBER to have read of a Professor at Paris, who was so ardently 

 attached to the Poems of Homer, that he always carried a copy in his 

 pocket, and even in church not unfrequently studied them instead of 

 his prayer-book. Dark and mysterious is thy history, thou singer of 

 the ancient time ! — Thy spirit seems to have come up on the old world, 

 like the mighty eagle gazed on by Esdras, from the dark waters of 

 time, and covering the whole earth with one vast and everlasting sha- 

 dow. I have generally found, in my researches into the literature of a 

 country, that the life of one great man is, in truth, the fructification, so 

 to speak, of the age in which he lives. A band of illustrious men begin 

 to gather around him, and iEschylus was followed by Sophocles, and 

 Phidias by Praxiteles, and Dante by Petrarch and Boccaccio. But Homer 

 stood alone, an intellectual Omnipresence. Blending in his own person 

 the authority of the law-giver, and the religion of the priest, and the 

 sanctity of the poet, and the influence of the historian, he was indeed, as 

 the Italian poet styled him, the first Painter of the Ancient Memories. 



The Iliad was indeed the " Secular Bible" of the Grecian, and he 

 pondered over it, as an inspired volume. The Poet's name was an old 

 familiar sound, one of the household words which the child learned in 

 his boyhood teachings, and in after-times he looked upon his poems, as 

 upon a book in which the name of his dearest friend had been graven 

 by hands long since cold in ashes. It is one of the peculiar charms of the 

 poetry of Homer, that it associates itself with all our early calm and 

 beautiful dreamings. I read Horace, and Tacitus, and even Livy — 

 the sweet and picturesque Livy — with more or less pleasure ; but the 

 idea of a task was ever present with me. Homer, on the contrary, was 

 my companion, and whether the path lay across the clover fields, or 

 along the green and dewy lanes, full of music and sunshine, scattered 

 around our sequestered village, he was rarely absent from my heart, 

 and I suffered the short summer hours to glide away, while I medi- 

 tated in awe on the Necyomanteia, or shed tears of pure sorrow over the 

 young Astyanax' pathetic picture of his coming afflictions. — Let me go 

 back unto thee yet again, thou blind old man of Scio ! — thou chosen of the 

 heart, thou garnered of the memory ! — let us listen yet once more to the 

 thousand voices of that river of song, which the lips have poured around 

 the city of Troy ! — Let my memory sit among the spears, and the 

 chariots, and the plumed chiefs of that tournament of the ancient 

 chivalry ! 



I number among our choicest earthly blessings the power of feeling 

 intensely the beauties of the imagination. IMy thoughts return to tlie 

 spring-like days when I stood listening to the adventures of Robinson 

 Crusoe, or more earnestly still, with the tears in my eyes, to the story of 

 the Children in the Wood. But my after-delight was in the study of 

 the ancient poets. How distinctly do I remember the day when the 

 first book of the Iliad, with notes and an interpretation, was put into my 

 hands ! It has been said that this is inferior to the succeeding in variety 

 and imagination, but at that period I knew nothing of critics or criti- 

 cism ; I seemed to wander through some ruined gallery of ancient sta- 

 tuary, mossy and ivy-grown, while the moonlight fell like a transparent 

 curtain, and the gleams danced along the mouldering floor like the foot- 

 steps of the olden poetry. 



