s keep
echoing through some artful strain, that all the while is thought by
them who listen to come in simplicity from the unpremeditating heart.
Songs, hymns, elegies, epicedia, epithalamia--rhyme rules alike all the
shadowy tribes. The triumphant ode--the penitential psalm--wisdom's
moral lesson--the philosophic strain "that vindicates the ways of God to
man;" such is the range of rhyme, down all the depths of the pathetic,
up all the heights of the sublime. It is yet unlimited. Where shall we
find its bounds? Let us try.

In the Epos, the poet in person is the relater. But he hides his own
personality in that of the Muse he invokes; and offers himself to his
auditors as the Voice only by which she speaks. She, the Muse, is
thought to be throughout a faithful recorder; for she is supposed to
have access to know all; and however marvellous may be the narrations,
they are accepted with undoubting faith. Since she speaks, or rather
sings, and the auditor only listens, the commonest and the most uncommon
events are, in one respect, upon an even footing. For the hearer must
picture them for himself. All are alike acted absent from the senses,
and before the imagination alone. Hence the Epic Poet has an
extraordinary facility afforded him for introducing into his work that
order of representation which is called the marvellous. For it is just
as easy to the hearer to set before his fancy a giant or a pigmy, as a
man; the one-eyed monster Polyphemus, as the beautiful, the graceful,
the swift, the strong, the sublime, the terrible Achilles. It is just as
easy for him to transport himself in fancy to the summit of Olympus, to
the palace of Jupiter, and to the Council or to the Banquet of the Gods,
or to the deep sea-caves where Thetis sits with her companion nymphs in
the hall of her father, the sea-god Nereus--as it is to remove himself
from the festal hall, where the poet is singing to him and to the other
guests, away to the camp of the Greeks, or to the court of Priam, or to
the bower of Andromache. He has no more difficulty to think of Minerva
darting, in the likeness of a hawk, from the snowy crest of Olympus to
the shore of the Hellespont--or to imagine the Thunderer in his
celestial car, lashing on his golden-maned steeds that pace the clouds
and the air, and waft him at the speed almost of a wish from the
unfolding portals of heaven to the summit of Mount Ida--than when he is
called upon, in the midst of some totally