utterance to thoughts. He painted by an epithet or a line. Even the
celebrated description of the fires in the plain of Troy, likened to
the moon in a serene night, is contained in seven lines. His
rosy-fingered morn--cloud-compelling Jupiter--Neptune, stiller of the
waves--Aurora rising from her crocus bed--Night drawing her veil over
the heavens--the black keel careering through the lashing waves--the
shout of the far-sounding sea--and the like, from which subsequent
poets and dramatists have borrowed so largely, are all brief
allusions, or epithets, which evidently did not form the main object
of his strains. He was a close observer of nature--its lights, its
shades, its storms and calms, its animals, their migrations, their
cries and habits; but he never suspends his narrative to describe
them. We shall look in vain in the _Iliad_, and even the _Odyssey_,
for the lengthened pictures of scenery which are so frequent in Virgil
and Tasso, and appear in such rich profusion in Milton. He describes
storms only as objects of terror, not to paint them to the eye. Such
things are to be found in the book of Job and in the Psalms, but with
the same brevity and magical force of emphatic expression. There never
was a greater painter of nature than Homer; there never was a man who
aimed less at being so.

The portraying of character and event was the great and evident object
of the Grecian bard; and there his powers may almost be pronounced
unrivalled. He never tells you, unless it is sometimes to be inferred
on an epithet, what the man's character that he introduces is. He
trusts to the character to delineate itself. He lets us get acquainted
with his heroes, as we do with persons around us, by hearing them
speak, and seeing them act. In preserving character, in this dramatic
way of representing it, he is unrivalled. He does not tell you that
Nestor had the garrulity of age, and loved to recur to the events of
his youth; but he never makes him open his mouth without descanting on
the adventures of his early years, and the degenerate race of mortals
who have succeeded the paladins of former days. He does not tell us
that Achilles was wrathful and impetuous; but every time he speaks,
the anger of the son of Peleus comes boiling over his lips. He does
not describe Agamemnon as overbearing and haughty; but the pride of
the king of men is continually appearing in his words and actions, and
it is the evident moral of the _Iliad_ to re