He sees
the poor weaving woman, weighing the wool, that she may not defraud
her employers, and yet may win bread for her children. He sees the
children, the golden head of Astyanax, his shrinking from the
splendour of the hero's helm. He sees the child Odysseus, going
with his father through the orchard, and choosing out some apple
trees "for his very own." It is in the mouth of the ruthless
Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands
of death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes.
"Wherefore weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that
runs by her mother's side, praying her mother to take her up,
snatching at her gown, and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully
looking at her till her mother takes her up?--like her, Patroclus,
dost thou softly weep."
This is what Chesterfield calls "the porter-like language of Homer's
heroes." Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and
all things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved
when the great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after
twenty years, but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome.
With all this love of the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on
every detail of armour, of implement, of art; on the divers-coloured
gold-work of the shield, on the making of tires for chariot-wheels,
on the forging of iron, on the rose-tinted ivory of the Sidonians,
on cooking and eating and sacrificing, on pet dogs, on wasps and
their ways, on fishing, on the boar hunt, on scenes in baths where
fair maidens lave water over the heroes, on undiscovered isles with
good harbours and rich land, on ploughing, mowing, and sowing, on
the furniture of houses, on the golden vases wherein the white dust
of the dead is laid,--with all this delight in the real, Homer is
the most romantic of poets.
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