poetry: First comes the age of short narrative songs; next, when
these have become numerous, there arise constructive minds who
re-cast and blend together many of them into a larger aggregate,
conceived upon some scheme of their own. The age of the epos is
followed by that of the epopee: short spontaneous effusions prepare
the way, and furnish materials for the architectonic genius of the
poet. It is farther presumed by the above-mentioned authors that
the pre-Homeric epic included a great abundance of such smaller
songs--a fact which admits of no proof, but which seems
countenanced by some passages in Homer, and is in itself no way
improbable. But the transition from such songs, assuming them to be
ever so numerous, to a combined and continuous poem, forms an epoch
in the intellectual history of a nation, implying mental qualities
of a higher order than those upon which the songs themselves
depend. Nor is it at all to be imagined that the materials pass
unaltered from their first state of combination: they must of
necessity be re-cast, and undergo an adapting process, in which the
genius of the organising poet consists; and we cannot hope, by
simply knowing them as they exist in the second stage, ever to
divine how they stood in the first. Such, in my judgment, is the
right conception of the Homeric epoch--an organising poetical mind,
still preserving that freshness of observation and vivacity of
details which constitutes the charm of the ballad.

"Nothing is gained by studying the Iliad as a congeries of
fragments once independent of each other: no portion of the poem
can be shown to have ever been so, and the supposition introduces
difficulties greater than those which it removes. But it is not
necessary to affirm that the whole poem, as we now read it,
belonged to the original and preconceived plan. In this respect the
_Iliad_ produces upon my mind an impression totally different from
the _Odyssey._ In the latter poem the characters and incidents are
fewer; the whole plot appears of one projection, from the beginning
down to the death of the suitors: none of the parts look as if they
had been composed separately, and inserted by way of addition into
a pre-existing smaller poem. But the _Iliad_, on the contrary,
presents the appearance of