ed pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he
scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the
hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or
question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law,
meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending
will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death
and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such
things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but
detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he
was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic
meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing
the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.

Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all
self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all
modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm;
Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad
are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except
from above. 'God's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man
to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And
at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a
defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my
strength is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of
the gods, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from
thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'

So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of
Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great
poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the
general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and
on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem
to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular
discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is
enough for the completion of his destiny--for his reward, if he lives
nobly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or
scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented
with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are;
it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible t