eces which are a household word, and
weakening our mental relish for the eternal works of genius! Old Homer
is the very fountain-head of pure poetic enjoyment, of all that is
spontaneous, simple, native, and dignified in life. He takes us into
the ambrosial world of heroes, of human vigor, of purity, of grace.
Now Homer is one of the few poets the life of whom can be fairly
preserved in a translation. Most men and women can say that they have
read Homer, just as most of us can say that we have studied Johnson's
Dictionary. But how few of us take him up, time after time, with fresh
delight! How few have even read the entire "Iliad" and "Odyssey"
through! Whether in the resounding lines of the old Greek, as fresh
and ever-stirring as the waves that tumble on the seashore, filling
the soul with satisfying silent wonder at its restless unison; whether
in the quaint lines of Chapman, or the clarion couplets of Pope, or
the closer versions of Cowper, Lord Derby, of Philip Worsley, or even
in the new prose version of the "Odyssey," Homer is always fresh and
rich. And yet how seldom does one find a friend spellbound over the
Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of
magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle
vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow,
through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which
will listen to "Pinafore" for three hundred nights, and will read M.
Zola's seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read
a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer just as it will read
about a cuneiform inscription, and will crowd to see a few pots which
probably came from the neighborhood of Troy. But to Homer and the
primeval type of heroic man in his beauty, and his simpleness, and
joyousness, the cultured generation is really dead, as completely as
some spoiled beauty of the ballroom is dead to the bloom of the
heather or the waving of the daffodils in a glade.

It is a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture
seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One
knows--at least every schoolboy has known--that a passage of Homer,
rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a
hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows
that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets;
that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit eve