ing his bread from the cold charity of
strangers--the wailings of Priam and Hecuba, when that noble chief awaited
before the Scaean Gate the approach of Achilles--the passionate
lamentations of the Grecian chief over the dead body of Patroclus--never
were surpassed in any language; they abound with traits of nature, which,
to the end of the world, will fascinate and melt the human heart. The
tender melancholy of Evander for the fate of Pallas, who had perished by
the spear of Turnus, is of the same description, and will bear a
comparison with its touching predecessor. But these are all the sorrows of
domestic life. Virgil and Tasso, in the description of the despair
consequent on the severing of the ties of the passion of love, have opened
a new field, unknown in the previous poetry of antiquity. It is to be
found touched on in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and but
touched on. The passion they represent under the name of love was not what
we understand by the word, or what constitutes so important an element in
the poetry and romance of modern Europe. It was not the imaginative flame
feeding on hope, nursed by smiles, transcendent in enjoyment, but a
furious mania, resembling rather, and classed with, the ravings of
insanity. Destiny was the grand ruling power in Greek tragedy: the
distress brought out was the striving of man against the iron chain of
fate. Love as a passion, independent of destiny, detached from sense,
feeding on the imagination, living in the presence of the beloved object,
is glanced at in Catullus; but it is in Virgil that we must look for the
perfect delineation of its suffering, a thorough knowledge of its
nature--in Tasso, that it has been wrought up to the highest conceivable
perfection.

But, for all that, we will not have old Homer defrauded of his dues. The
_Iliad_ cannot, for the reasons already mentioned, produce passages to be
placed beside the pathetic tenderness of Dido's love for AEneas, the
romantic chivalry of Tancredi, or Erminia's passion. But in the earlier
and more natural affections, in the delineation of domestic grief, in the
rending asunder the parental or filial ties, who has ever surpassed the
pathetic simplicity of the Grecian bard? Where can we find such
heart-rending words as Priam addresses to Hector, leaning over the towers
of Troy, when his heroic son was calmly awaiting the approach of the
god-like Achilles, resplendent in the panoply of Vulcan, and shielde