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LEIANO STANE

LIBRA

UNIVER SILL

A13335

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THE Iliad was written by Homer. Will Wolf and Knight tell us how it happened that all the heroic strains about the war before Troy, poured forth, as they opine, by many bards, regarded but one period of the siege? By what divine felicity was it that all those sons of song, though apart in time and place, united in chanting the wrath of Achilles? The poem is one-like a great wood, whose simultaneous growth overspreads a mountain. Indeed one mighty poem, in process of time, moulded into form out of separate fragments, composed by a brotherhood of bards-not even coeval-may be safely pronounced an impossibility in nature.

Achilles was not the son of many sires; nor was the part he played written for him by a succession of "eminent hands," all striving to find fit work for their common hero. He is not a creature of collected traditions. He stands there-a single conception-in character and in achieve ment;-his absence is felt like that of a thunder cloud withdrawn behind a hill, leaving the air still sultry;his presence is as the lightning in sudden illumination glorifying the whole field of battle. Kill, bury, and forget him, and the Iliad is no more an Epic.

No two men at the same time ever yet saw a ghost; because a ghost is

VOL. XXXV. NO. CCXVII.

an Eidolon begotten by the imagination on the air of night, or some night-like day, and is visible but to his own frightened father. Now, Achilles was an Apparition; and his seer was a blind old man, with a front like Jove's, and a forehead like Olympus. "All power was given him in that dreadful trance;" and Beauty and Terror accompanied the Destroyer. He haunted Homer, who no longer knew that he had himself created the sublimest of all Phantoms. But the Muse gave the maker command over his creature; and, at the waving of his hand, the imaginary Goddess-born came and went obedient, more magnificent than any shadowy form that at the bidding of sunlight stalks along mountains into an abisme of clouds.

The Odyssey-also and likewise -was written by Homer, and the proof lies all in one word-Ulysses.

There he is-the self-same being as in the Iliad, and the birth of one brain. Had Homer died the day he said, " And thus they celebrated the obsequies of Hector the Tamer-ofHorses," before no mortal eye would have stood on the threshold of his own hall, pouring out from his quiver all the arrows at his feet, that vision of a ragged beggar, suddenly transfigured into an Avenger more glorious far than Apollo's self trans

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