As to movement, form, and colour.
In other places Homer describes with no less of sympathetic emotion the vivid and fiery movements of the animal. The most remarkable of all is the noble simile of the stall-kept horse, whom every reader seems to see as with proud head and flowing mane, when he feels his liberty, he scours the boundless pastures.
That adaptation, or effort at adaptation, of sound to sense, which with poets in general (always excepting especially Dante and Shakespeare,) is a sign that they have applied their whole force to careful elaboration, is with Homer only a proof of a fuller and deeper flow of his sympathies: wherever we find it, we may be sure that his whole heart is in the passage. In this very simile how admirable is the transition from the fine stationary verse that describes the charger’s customary bathe,
εἰωθὼς λούεσθαι ἐϋρρεῖος ποταμοῖο,
to his rapid and easy bounding over the plain, when every dactyl marks a spring[764];
ῥίμφα ἑ γοῦνα φέρει μετά τ’ ἤθεα καὶ νόμον ἵππων.
For this adaptation of metre to sense in connection with the movement of horses, we may take another example. To describe Agamemnon dealing destruction among the routed Trojans on foot, we have a line and a half of somewhat accelerated but by no means very rapid movement[765];
ὣς ἄρ’ ὑπ’ Ἀτρείδῃ Ἀγαμέμνονι πῖπτε κάρηνα
Τρώων φευγόντων.