Well, then, we were put in possession of the Homer of Chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the "famousest" passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek captains, with that wonderfully vivid portrait of an orator, in Ulysses, in the Third Book, beginning at the 237th line,—
"But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise";
the helmet and shield of Diomed, in the opening of the Fifth Book; the prodigious description of Neptune's passage in his chariot to the Achive ships, in the opening of the Thirteenth Book,—
"The woods, and all the great hills near,
trembled beneath the weight
Of his immortal moving feet."
The last was the whole of the shipwreck of Ulysses in the Fifth Book of the "Odyssey." I think his expression of delight, during the reading of those dozen lines, was never surpassed:—
"Then forth he came, his both knees faltering, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sunk to death.
The sea had soaked his heart through; all his veins
His toils had racked t' a laboring woman's pains.
Dead weary was he."
On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet of Pope's upon the same passage:—
"From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
And lost in lassitude, lay all the man."
Chapman supplied us with many an after-feast; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this, his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other inclosure than his famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring; yet he contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two miles, before 10, A.M. In the published copy of this sonnet he made an alteration in the seventh line:—
"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene."