-the very fact that the speech of Homer is a dead speech, helps make Homer's fame immortal, and immortally first among poems in presumptive rank of genius. The world can never grow any farther away from the Iliad than it is to-day. Our readers will be glad to come into some closer acquaintance with this great monument of the human mind.

Everybody will have heard the noise of the wrangle that has been made, especially of late, concerning the authorship of the Iliad, and concerning the reality of the existence of the man that we know by the name of Homer. Whether, in fact, the Iliad is properly to be regarded as one poem, whether it may not better be considered a collection of different pieces, strung together in a kind of mechanical continuity, not constituting any true organic unity, whether such a personage as Homer ever actually lived, and whether, if he did, he ever composed the Iliad-these are some of the startling, the staggering questions that have been not only seriously, but almost acrimoniously, debated by recent scholars. We shall not at this stage trouble our readers with any thing beyond the present allusion to this redoubtable controversy. The one fact that stands, and stands foursquare to all the winds that blow, is the Iliad itself. Here is the Iliad, whoever wrote it, and whatever it is. Let us go at once about our task of comprehending it as well as we can.

The Iliad is so entitled from the word Ilium, which is the alternative name of Troy. The title is not a perfectly happy one, but no matter for that. It is the title. Nobody will ever succeed in substituting another. We could not call the poem the Troad, if we wanted to, for that word is already appropriated for the country or region of Asia Minor, in which Ilium, or Troy, was situated. Since the poet's own opening lines give for the subject of the poem the wrath of Achilles, [A-kil'les,] we might have as our title, The Achillead, or, likening the word in form to the name of Virgil's epic, The Æne'id, The Achilleid.

The siege of Troy is sometimes said to be the subject of the Iliad. This, however, is not exactly the case. Not the siege the siege occupied ten years-but an episode of the siege, namely, the wrath, or miff, we might fitly, if disrespect. fully, call it, of Achilles, is the real subject. The time covered by the poem is short, less than two months. The action belongs to the last year of the siege, but the end of the siege, the downfall of Troy, does not come within the plan of the poem.

What occasioned the siege was the rape of Helen. Helen was the lovely wife and queen of Men-e-la'us, a Grecian king. Young prince Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy, was visiting Menelaus, and he abused his privilege of guestship by seducing his host's wife to elope with him to Troy. Adding a peculiar baseness to his perfidy, Paris bore off considerable treasure, along with the lady. All Greece made common cause with outraged Menelaus. Having first spent years in preparation for war, and then made solemn requisition through embassy, in vain, for the return both of the beauty and the booty, the confederate kings mustered their forces, and sailed across to the plain of Troy to besiege the city. Ten years almost, the weary siege had prolonged itself, and now, upon an occasion that well brings out the fiercely animal appetites which animated the leading combatants, Achil les gets angry and sulks in his tent, his fellow chieftains meantime trying their fortune in fight without him. The occasion is the arbitrary interference of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the confederate Greeks, to deprive Achilles of a female captive Bri-se'is, and usurp her to himself. It being conceded that either marauder had a right to the lady, Achilles seems to have been indignant with reason.

Such is the occasion of the famous wrath of Achilles. And the wrath of Achilles is the subject of the most renowned of poems. One cannot help feeling a little revolt at the unworthiness of the theme. The sentiment of such a revolt

Milton does not hesitate, in his large, free, lordly way, to express, in a passage of Paradise Lost. He is letting slip a bit of his autobiography-with that lofty egotism of his, whose very audacity vindicates it, to the admiring and sympathetic reader. Milton admits his reader to his confidence about his own meditation and choice of a subject for the exercise of his poetical genius. Of the theme finally chosen by him,

he says:

Sad task! yet argument

Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall.

The whole passage would interest our readers. It is to be found in the opening of the ninth book.

Our preamble has now been sufficient, and we begin at once with the poem itself-premising, however, yet this one thing more, that the preparatory course includes usually but about two books of the twenty-four of which the poem consists. The college curriculum generally resumes the poem, though it is, of course, never read entire in the class-room. We here advise our readers that the final issue of the Trojan affair, in the poem and beyond it, is as follows: The Greeks suffer cruelly under Achilles's withdrawal from the fight, until in sheer patriotic shame, Pa-tro'clus, the close friend of Achilles, is, with that moody warrior's approval, self-incited to go into battle wearing the Achillean armor. Patroclus does wonders, but is slain. Achilles, stung with resentment and remorse, now returns to the field, encounters Hector, the redoubtable Trojan champion, slays him, and is at length himself slain with an arrow from the bow of Paris hitting him in the heel, where alone he was vulnerable. The chieftains make their way, with many chances, back toward Greece, some of them, however, perishing in the voyage. The adventures of one of their chieftains, Ulysses, or Odysseus, to keep the Greek, non-Latinized name, form the subject of the

Odyssey. As has been intimated, the Iliad itself closes before the fall of Troy, with the death and funeral rites of Hector.

The opening lines of the poem have been much admired. for the simplicity, the beauty, and the melody with which they set forth the poet's theme. Here they are, first, in a translation of our own, which, though metrical, is strictly, very strictly, faithful to the Greek-and then in various other metrical versions from famous hands, which our readers may like to compare one with another, in order the more intelligently to judge of the freedom with which poetical translators treat their original:

The anger, goddess, sing of Peleus' son
Achilles,-anger dire, that on the Greeks
Brought myriad woes, and many mighty souls
Too soon of heroes unto Hades sent,
And gave themselves a ravin to the dogs
And to all birds of prey-howbeit the will
Of Zeus fulfilled itself-even from the time
That first they two, Atrides, king of men,
And high Achilles, wrangling fell apart.

First, our readers shall see for comparison the work of George Chapman, (1557-1634,) worthy to be reckoned the great pioneer of English Homeric translation in verse. Chapman's Homer is written in fourteen-syllabled lines, which, after the writer gets fairly under way, become full of freedom and fire. It was on occasion of reading this English Homer that Keats composed his celebrated sonnet, despite its faults one of the finest sonnets in the language, as follows:

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Much have I travel'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

And now for Chapman :

Achilles' baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that imposed
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many a brave soul los'd
From breasts heroic; sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave;
To all which Jove's will gave effect; from whom first strife begun
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis' godlike son.

Here are Pope's swinging heroics, with an Alexandrine to boot at the end, representing four words in Homer:

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove !

Mr. Bryant translates as follows:

O Goddess! sing the wrath of Peleus' son,
Achilles; sing the deadly wrath that brought
Woes numberless upon the Greeks, and swept
To Hades many a valiant soul, and gave
Their limbs a prey to dogs and birds of air,—
For so had Jove appointed,-from the time
When the two chiefs, Atrides, king of men,
And great Achilles, parted first as foes.

For the sake of the comparison, we subjoin Cowper's rendering, and Derby's. Of Derby's version, as a whole, it may be said that it does very well for a nobleman-very well. It is the gold of poetry in the lead of rhetoric. The metal is

not quite so precious, it is true, but then the hammering is really very faithful and good.

Cowper:

Achilles sing, O Goddess! Peleus' son;

His wrath pernicious, who ten thousand woes
Caused to Achaia's host, sent many a soul