lyO Homer: a Rhapsody. ^August, 



for young persons at school and college, and liking much the tone which 

 pervades it, I purjiose taking, in the course of my rhapsody, an occa- 

 sional notice of its contents. Now that Mr. Brougham is Lord Chan- 

 cellor, and cannot, by reason of his numerous duties, devote so much of 

 his attention as formerly to the diffusion of Ufieful and entertaining know- 

 ledge, it becomes in me and others a duty to supply his place to the 

 utmost of our poor ability, and I proceed, therefore, like the rhapsodists 

 of old, to weave the imperishable thread of wisdom into the golden 

 web of my dreams and visionings. 



I sometimes wish that Longinus had never written his treatise on the 

 sublime and beautiful : many are the errors to which the dicta of the 

 famous minister of Zenobia have given birth. Yet who, with one gleam 

 of poetry in his heart, would ever think of confounding the sublime 

 and the beautiful ? Sublimity — the breath of one breathing into the 

 dry bones, and startling in an instant, into perfect form and feature, the 

 dust of all ages and of all people — the light upon the hands of Lazarus, 

 when he stretched them forth from the sepulchre — the shadow falling 

 from the wings of the Cherubim upon him who sitteth beneath them. 

 Beauty — the music which covereth the spirit of man like a raiment — 

 the memory of the face of one beloved — the sorrow, thrown like a 

 shroud upon our heart's gladness. Sublimity, dim, mysterious, inex- 

 plicable in its origin, the path of the soul in a former state of power, 

 magnificence and glory. Beauty, the serenity of the Omnipotent, 

 garmenting every work of mortal hands, from the dark and solemn 

 cathedral, to the ivy-grown walls of the old and obsolete priory. The 

 French critic. La Harpe, has analysed Longinus' Treatise ; but what 

 idea of sublimity can he have formed, who talks of comparing the 

 Henriadc to the Paradise Lost ! The mind of Voltaire could not feel 

 the glory of the Epos in others, much less embody it. But La Harpe, 

 who was really a pleasant writer upon things not too lofty for his com- 

 prehension, has been surpassed by Hiiet, who wrote a treatise to prove 

 that the splendid line in Genesis — God said, Let there be light, and there 

 was light ! is not sublime. Blair, again, whose thoughts are as leafless 

 as the polar trees, and whose mind was more dry and sapless than the 

 mummy recently explored by the Royal Society, says, there is no poetry 

 in the prophecies of Daniel and Jonah. Reader, turn to Daniel, chap. 

 10, verse 6 — speaking of the vision : — the voice of his words was like the 

 voice of a multitude ! Is there no poetry in Daniel ? Look at the 2nd 

 chapter of Jonah: — "The waters compassed tne about, even to the soul; the 

 depth closed me round about ; the weeds were wrapped about my head." 



And these men are to guide us in our appreciation of a poet ! 



, But let me return to Homer. " The truth is," observes the 



author of the Introduction to which I have more than once referred, 

 " that there are not many passages in the Iliad which can be properly 

 called sublime ; the grandest of those few, beyond comparison, is the 

 description of the universal horror and tumult attending on the battle 

 of the gods ; whilst the real characteristics of the poem are truth, good 

 sense, rapidity, and variety, bodied forth into shape by a vivid imagina- 

 tion, and borne on the musical wings of an inimitable versification." 



That there are not many passages in the Iliad coming under the title of 

 S2iblime, I think in some measure true ; but still we consider the charac- 

 ter of the poem to be sublimity — not the sublimity resulting from parts, 

 but from a 7vkolc ; — not from separate and individual images, but from 



