Went forward, Mary took another mate:
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.
A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are; but between the simplicity of the two there is all the difference that there is between the simplicity of Homer and the simplicity of Moschus.
But, whether the hexameter establish itself or not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of Homer, I feel sure that this vehicle will not be furnished by the ballad-form. On this question about the ballad-character of Homer’s poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise: he suggests that those who say Homer’s poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference between them; that it should be agreed that Homer’s poems are ballads a little, but not so much as some have said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr Blackie invites me to this compromise; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it; I cannot allow that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Everyone knows the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet’s own feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth, his great time, his annus mirabilis, about 1800, strove to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it; he would have used it if he could: but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds.
The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.
That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand:
I, too, have passed her on the hills,