ΑΕΙΔΕ, Sing.
NORTH.
Yes, my lads, these were the received formulas of beseeching with which the Minstrels of Hellas invoked succour of the divine Muse, when their burning tongue would fit well to the Harp transmitted Tales, fraught with old heroic remembrance, with solemn belief, with oracular wisdom. ΕΠΕ, Tell, ΕΠΟΣ, The Tale. And when, step after step, the Harp modelling the Verse, and the Verse charming power and beauty, and splendour and pathos—like a newly-created and newly-creating soul—into its ancestral Tradition—when insensibly the benign Usurper, the Muse, had made the magnificent dream rightly and wholly her own at last.— ΕΠΟΣ, The Sung Tale. Homer, to all following ages the chief Master of Eloquence whether in Verse or in Prose, has yet maintained the simplicity of Telling.
"For he came beside the swift ships of the Achæans,
Proposing to release his daughter, and bringing immense ransom;
Having in his hand the fillet of the far-shooting Apollo,
On the golden rod: and he implored of the Achæans,
And the sons of Atreus, most of all, the two Orderers of the People."
These few words of a tongue stately, resplendent, sonorous, and numerous, more than ours—and already the near Scamandrian Field feels, and fears, and trembles. Milton! The world has rolled round, and again round, from the day of that earlier to that of the later Mæonides. All the soul-wealth hoarded in words, which merciful Time held aloft, unsubmerged by the Gothic, by the Ottoman inundation; all the light shrined in the Second, the Intellectual Ark that, divinely built and guided, rode tilting over the tempestuous waste of waters; all the mind, bred and fostered by New Europe, down to within two hundred years of this year that runs: These have put differences between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, in matter and in style, which to state and illustrate would hold me speaking till sunset.
BULLER.
And us listening.
NORTH.
The Fall of Hector and of his Troy! The Fall of Adam and of his World!
BULLER.