Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the Ægean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of the blue-eyed Athena, it was the air which passed among his Greek hosts at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a touch the old spirit in them; or in the tent of Achilles took him by the yellow hair, and directed him, a spirit and a presence.
Again and again throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sensitive and watchful will note this persistency and preoccupation, this recurrent observation of the air in its manifold behaviors, as of something dear or memorable, from the swirling, snatching Harpies to the clean-breathed morning; from the sullen sultriness of Achilles's wrath—a stubborn heat that will not stir—to the swift flight of windy arrows cleansing the banquet-hall of Ithaca. So too, that divinity to whom he paid his most constant homage was Athena, goddess of knowledge and of the air, who exquisitely typified, not alone wisdom, but, as almost one with wisdom, the most moving and yielding of the elements.
How well by these things have we come to know Homer—who yet know not by seven chances even so much as the city of his birth! The bare facts of biography seem poor when compared with these preferences, these preoccupations and predilections of the very man himself.
So, too, though we knew little else about him, it were possible to take the full measure of St. Francis of Assisi by his haunting persistent love of brotherhood. Nothing else in all his deeds and words is half so strong. One even comes to believe that his devotion to his beloved Lady Poverty was—doubtless unknown to himself—rendered solely because it made him one of a larger fraternity and brother to a greater number of men. The fire that burned and seared him was his brother, even as was the beneficent luminary that warmed him. From his triumphant salutation to his radiant 'brother the sun,' on down to the delicate and gentle admonishings of his 'little brothers' the birds and fishes, the thought of an unlimited and unfettered fraternity perpetually dominates his loving spirit.
In like manner I have noted in my many readings of Matthew Arnold that his mind seems to have responded with a peculiar sensitiveness, and been often subject to the sound and meaning of moving waters, and to the high destiny of stars. It would seem that 'the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea' came in time to have a definite power over him in the ordering of his images and even in the determining of his philosophies; that rivers flowing silver under the sun, or, unguessed, in subterranean chambers, became to him interpretative of life itself, and their course and channel and ultimate end a promise to his soul. It is not alone in his poetry that one finds the 'incognizable sea,' and hears so frequently of its coasts and beaches and sands and watery wastes and isles; of voyages and charts; the 'swinging waters and the clustered pier'; the ebbing and flowing of tides; and the still stars: one comes upon these in his prose not less, very especially and memorably in his Study of Poetry.
It may be argued that these might be mere favorite figures and symbols; but it is hardly thinkable, after a careful study of them, that they are not rather haunting influences and impressions having long a familiar access to the chambers of his mind, now taking him with his forsaken Merman,—
| Down, down, down! |
| Down to the depths of the sea! |
or with the Neckan beside the green Baltic, pointing out the sounding deeps, and the starry poles, and interpreting life's meanings by them.
So too,—to pass but lightly from one to another,—we can hardly read Chaucer devotedly without at length becoming aware how this poet seems to have been haunted by the idea of the freshness and loveliness of the day's awaking; his very heroes and heroines again and again seeming to partake of it, and to be like dawn themselves upon the hills.
Up rose the sun and up rose Emilie.