n the four
maidens of Circe, daughters of wells and woods, and of sacred streams. He
is the second-sighted man, and beholds the shroud that wraps the living
who are doomed, and the mystic dripping from the walls of blood yet
unshed. He has walked in the garden closes of Phaeacia, and looked on
the face of gods who fare thither, and watch the weaving of the dance. He
has eaten the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, and from the hand of Helen
he brings us that Egyptian nepenthe which puts all sorrow out of mind.
His real world is as real as that in _Henry V._, his enchanted isles are
charmed with the magic of the _Tempest_. His young wooers are as
insolent as Claudio, as flushed with youth; his beggar-men are brethren
of Edie Ochiltree; his Nausicaa is sister to Rosalind, with a different
charm of stately purity in love. His enchantresses hold us yet with
their sorceries; his Helen is very Beauty: she has all the sweetness of
ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without remorse. His Achilles is
youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful, splendid, and sad, ardent and
loving, and conscious of its doom. Homer, in truth, is to be matched
only with Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare he has not the occasional
wilfulness, freakishness, and modish obscurity. He is a poet all of
gold, universal as humanity, simple as childhood, musical now as the flow
of his own rivers, now as the heavy plunging wave of his own Ocean.

Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and
greatest of poets. This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant of,
if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the
distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose
translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to
Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests the
various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse give us a
feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded to their own
style. Translators who employ prose "tell the story without the song,"
but, at least, they add no twopenny "beauties" and cheap conceits of
their own.

I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which the
mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are
parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated. The
passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the slaying of
the wooers in the hall:--

"Ah! wretch