ame expressions do
not very frequently recur, often in exactly the same words. How much
this is the case with Homer--with how much discrimination and genius
his epithets and expressions were first chosen, and how frequently he
repeats them, almost in every page, need be told to none who are
acquainted with his writings. That is the most decisive mark at once
of genius and identity. Original thinkers fall into repetition of
expression, because they are always speaking from one model--their own
thoughts. Subordinate writers avoid this fault, because they are
speaking from the thoughts of others, and share their variety. It
requires as great an effort for the first to introduce difference of
expression, as for the last to reach diversity of thought.

The reader of Dante must not look for the heart-stirring and animated
narrative--the constant interest--the breathless suspense, which
hurries us along the rapid current of the _Iliad_. There are no
councils of the gods; no messengers winging their way through the
clouds; no combats of chiefs; no cities to storm; no fields to win. It
is the infernal regions which the poet, under the guidance of his
great leader, Virgil, visits; it is the scene of righteous retribution
through which he is led; it is the apportionment of punishment and
reward to crime or virtue, in this upper world, that he is doomed to
witness. We enter the city of lamentation--we look down the depths of
the bottomless pit--we stand at the edge of the burning lake. His
survey is not a mere transient visit like that of Ulysses in Homer, or
of AEneas in Virgil. He is taken slowly and deliberately through every
successive circle of Malebolge; descending down which, like the
visitor of the tiers of vaults, one beneath another, in a feudal
castle, he finds every species of malefactors, from the chiefs and
kings whose heroic lives were stained only by a few deeds of cruelty,
to the depraved malefactors whose base course was unrelieved by one
ray of virtue. In the very conception of such a poem, is to be found
decisive evidence of the mighty change which the human mind had
undergone since the expiring lays of poetry were last heard in the
ancient world; of the vast revolution of thought and inward conviction
which, during a thousand years, in the solitude of the monastery, and
under the sway of a spiritual faith, had taken place in the human
heart. A gay and poetic mythology no longer amazed the world by its
fictions