y from one cage to
another. He proposes at least, both in the "Iliad" and in the "Odyssey,"
to unfold a story; and he _seems_ to unfold it so artlessly that we
linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example,
what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve
us a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the
keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.

I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is
this apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at the
extreme of his difficulty--when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.

Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that no
poet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the great
Elizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated,
in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred
Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake," in
twelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not
overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the
bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the
sea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent,
the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals
between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy.
Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts,
and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:--

For ever climbing up the climbing wave

--your ship taking one wave much as she takes another--is in its nature
monotonous. Nay, you have only to read Falconer's "Shipwreck" to discover
how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in a
first-class tempest. Courses, reckonings, trimmings of canvas--these
occur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. But to the
reader, if he be a landsman, their repetition in narrative may easily
become intolerable; and when we get down to the 'trades,' even the seaman
sets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep. In short you
cannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as upon
the plains of windy Troy: nor could any but a superhuman genius make
sustained poetry (say) out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve,
which none the less was one of the most heroic f