d by
the AEgis of Minerva?

But we know not whether three lines in the _Odyssey_ do not convey a still
more touching picture of grief--so powerful is the wail of untaught
nature. When Proteus informed Menelaus of the murder of Agamemnon, his
grief is thus described--

"[Greek: Hos ephat': autar emoige kateklasthe philon etor
Klaion d' en psamathoisi kathemenos; oude ny moi ker
Ethel' eti zoein, kai horan phaos heelioio.]"
_Odyssey_, IV. 538.

"Thus he spoke; my soul was crushed within me; I sat weeping on the sand;
nor had I the heart to wish to live, and behold the light of the sun."
Here is the pathos of nature: "Rachel weeping for her children, and would
not be comforted, because they are not."

One peculiar beauty belongs to the epic poems of antiquity, and especially
Homer, from the combination of heroic sentiments and actions with a
simplicity which will be looked for in vain, and in truth would be
unseemly, in the later ages of society. We hear of princes, kings, and the
daughters of kings, and our imagination immediately clothes them with the
pomp and circumstance of modern royalty. But erelong some little
circumstance, let out as it were accidentally, brings us back at once to
the simplicity and habits of early life. Bellerophon met the daughter of a
king amidst the grassy meads, and a race of heroes sprung from this
occasion; but he met her as he was tending his herds, and she her lambs.
The beauteous daughters of the Trojan chiefs repaired to the hot and cold
springs of the Scamander, near the Scaean Gate, but they went there to wash
their clothes in its limpid fountains. The youngest daughter of Nestor,
with the innocence of a child, though the beauty of womanhood, did, by her
father's desire, to Telemachus the duties of the bath. Many a chief is
described as rich; but generally the riches consist in flocks and herds,
in wrought brass or golden ornaments--not unfrequently in meadows and
garden-stuffs. This beauty could not, from the superior age of the world,
belong to Tasso. His soldans are arrayed in all the pomp of Asiatic
magnificence--his princes appear in the pride of feudal power--his
princesses surrounded with the homage of chivalrous devotion. Virgil has
often the same exquisite traits of nature, the same refreshing return to
the young world, in the _AEneid_: He dwells on those peeps into pastoral
simplicity as Tacitus did on the virtue of the German