ell long together on scenes
of death, and when the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called
off by the rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of
human feeling) of other associations, not contrived, as an inferior
artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but to soften and relieve
them. Two warriors meet, and exchange their high words of defiance; we
hear the grinding of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and
breast-plate, and the crash of the armour, as this or that hero falls.
But at once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we are
summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy river, the tall poplar,
now waving its branches against the sky, now lying its length along in
the grass beside the water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry
labouring and lopping at it.

In the thick of the universal melee, when the stones and arrows are
raining on the combatants, and some furious hailstorm is the slightest
illustration with which we should expect him to heighten the effect of
the human tempest, so sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself
in its own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenomenon
in all nature--a stillness of activity, infinitely expressive of the
density of the shower of missiles, yet falling like oil on water on the
ruffled picture of the battle; the snow descending in the _still_ air,
covering first hills, then plains and fields and farmsteads; covering
the rocks down to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they
roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian wall, when
gates and battlements are sprinkled over with blood, and neither Greeks
nor Trojans can force their way against the other, we have, first, as an
image of the fight itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods,
disputing over a land boundary; and for the equipoise of the two armies,
the softest of all home scenes, a poor working woman weighing out her
wool before weaving it, to earn a scanty subsistence for herself and for
her children. Of course the similes are not all of this kind; it would
be monotonous if they were; but they occur often enough to mark their
meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see the same tendency.
Sarpedon struck through the thigh is borne off the field, the long spear
trailing from the wound, and there is too much haste to draw it out.
Hector flies past him and has no time to speak; all is dust, hurry, and
c