"Glory be with them, and eternal praise,
The Poets who on earth have made us heirs
Of Truth and pure Delight by heavenly lays!"
NORTH.
Glory to Verse, for its power is great. Man, from the garden in Eden, to the purifying by fire of the redeemed Earth—the creation of things Visible—Angels Upright and Fallen—and Higher than Angels—all the Regions of Space—Infinitude and Eternity—the Universality of Being—this is the copious matter of the Song. And herein there is place found, proper, distinct, and large, and prominent, for that whispered call to visit, in the freshness of morning, the dropping Myrrh—to study the opening beauty of the Flowers—to watch the Bee in her sweet labour—which tenderly dissipates from the lids of Eve her ominously-troubled sleep—free room for two tears, which, falling from a woman's eyes, are wiped with her hair—and for two more, which her pitying husband kisses away ere they fall. All these things Verse disposes, and composes, in One Presentment.
BULLER.
Glory to Verse, for its power is great—glory to our Accentual Iambic Pentameter.
NORTH.
Let us return to the Iliad. The Iliad is a history told by a mind that is arbiter, to a certain extent only, of its own facts. For Homer takes his decennial War and its Heroes, nay, the tenor of the story too, from long-descended Tradition. To his contemporary countrymen he appears as a Historian—not feigning, but commemorating and glorifying, transmitted facts.
SEWARD.
Ottfried Müller, asking how far Homer is tied up in his Traditions, ventures to suspect that the names of the Heroes whom Achilles kills, in such or such a fight, are all traditionary.
NORTH.