dren. He sees the children, the golden head of Astyanax, his
shrinking from the splendour of the hero's helm. He sees the child
Odysseus, going with his father through the orchard, and choosing out
some apple trees "for his very own." It is in the mouth of the ruthless
Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands of
death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes. "Wherefore
weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that runs by her
mother's side, praying her mother to take her up, snatching at her gown,
and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully looking at her till her
mother takes her up?--like her, Patroclus, dost thou softly weep."

This is what Chesterfield calls "the porter-like language of Homer's
heroes." Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and all
things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved when the
great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after twenty years,
but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome. With all this love of
the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on every detail of armour, of
implement, of art; on the divers-coloured gold-work of the shield, on the
making of tires for chariot-wheels, on the forging of iron, on the rose-
tinted ivory of the Sidonians, on cooking and eating and sacrificing, on
pet dogs, on wasps and their ways, on fishing, on the boar hunt, on
scenes in baths where fair maidens lave water over the heroes, on
undiscovered isles with good harbours and rich land, on ploughing,
mowing, and sowing, on the furniture of houses, on the golden vases
wherein the white dust of the dead is laid,--with all this delight in the
real, Homer is the most romantic of poets. He walks with the surest foot
in the darkling realm of dread Persephone, beneath the poplars on the
solemn last beach of Ocean. He has heard the Siren's music, and the song
of Circe, chanting as she walks to and fro, casting the golden shuttle
through the loom of gold. He enters the cave of the Man Eater; he knows
the unsunned land of the Cimmerians; in the summer of the North he has
looked, from the fiord of the Laestrygons, on the Midnight Sun. He has
dwelt on the floating isle of AEolus, with its wall of bronze unbroken,
and has sailed on those Phaeacian barks that need no help of helm or oar,
that fear no stress either of wind or tide, that come and go and return
obedient to a thought and silent as a dream. He has see