throughout this entire passage, one of the most splendid in the Iliad, appears to no mean advantage in comparison with the Christian. If Milton surpasses Homer, it is after all not so much Milton himself, as it is Milton's place in history. Homer had no Bible, and he lived before Christ. Besides, Homer was first and Milton was second.

Jupiter on Olympus gave the goddesses leave to go as they wished. Juno lost no time:

With the scourge she lashed the steeds,
And not unwillingly they flew between

Earth and the starry heaven. As much of space

As one who gazes on the dark blue deep

Sees from the headland summit where he sits-
Such space the coursers of immortal breed

Cleared at each bound they made with sounding hoofs;
And when they came to Ilium and its streams,
Where Simoïs and Scamander's channels meet,

The white-armed goddess Juno stayed their speed,
And loosed them from the yoke, and covered them
With darkness. Simois ministered, meanwhile,
The ambrosial pasturage on which they fed.

Arrived among the Greeks, Pallas moves about, and with eloquence pitched in various keys, the key of sarcasm being one, and a marked one, rouses their spirit for renewed battle. Diomed answers so much to her mind, that she confesses outright her admiration and approval of his character. She bids him make for no less a personage than the god Mars himself, whom we are pleased to note that she speaks of in terms of just detestation, though she thus speaks rather for the reason that he now fights on the wrong side, than that he loves so well to fight, on whatever side. Pallas, we say, bids Diomed boldly engage great Mars. She will stand by him and see him safely through. Mars hurls the first spear, but Pallas parries the blow:

The valiant Diomed

Made with his brazen spear the next assault,
And Pallas guided it to strike the waist

Where girded by the baldric. In that part

She wounded Mars, and tore the shining skin,
And drew the weapon back. The furious god
Uttered a cry as of nine thousand men,

Or of ten thousand rushing to the fight.
The Greeks and Trojans stood aghast with fear,
To hear that terrible cry of him whose thirst
Of bloodshed never is appeased by blood.

As when, in time of heat, the air is filled
With a black shadow from the gathering clouds,
And the strong-blowing wind, so furious Mars
Appeared to Diomed, as in a cloud

He rose to the broad heaven and to the home
Of gods on high Olympus. Near to Jove

He took his seat in bitter grief, and showed

The immortal blood still dropping from his wound,
And thus, with winged words, complaining said:

Mars gets little comfort from Jove, who sets him down much as he deserves. However, the Olympian father tells his physician to heal the wound. The sequel is thus described :

As when the juice

Of figs is mingled with white milk and stirred,
The liquid gathers into clots while yet

It whirls with the swift motion, so was healed

The wound of violent Mars. Then Hebe bathed

The god, and robed him richly, and he took

His seat, delighted, by Saturnian Jove.

Now, having forced the curse of nations, Mars,
To pause from slaughter, Argive Juno came,
With Pallas, her invincible ally,

Back to the mansion of imperial Jove.

The fifth book ends here. It is idle to deny that, grant Homer his absurd machinery, we have in the foregoing an incomparably spirited narrative, an incomparably lofty and sustained flight of poetry. Nothing can exceed, or certainly nothing yet ever has exceeded, the freedom, the power, the ease, the grace, with which this earliest of all uninspired poets that we know, moves here through the shifting scenes of his story-with which, the facility unchanged, he rises or sinks, according as his action proceeds in heaven or on earth. Homer's sublimity, in fact, is so ideal, that it is almost lost and forgotten in the lightness and the grace with which its

highest flights are accomplished. We have been bold to disparage; let us be just to applaud.

The sixth book continues the contest. The meddling gods, however, have withdrawn from the field. The pages reek with blood. It is a little relief of unexpected pathetic sentiment, to come upon lines like these following, in the midst of disgusting description of carnage. Diomed has met the son of Hippolochus, and, with much braggadocio, challenged him to combat and doomed him to death. He stays, however, to ask who it is that he is about to have the satisfaction of killing. The son of Hippolochus replies, but we shall give only the melancholy reflection with which his reply begins. For this brief bit of sentiment, peculiarly charming in Homer as here relieved so artistically against a bloody ground of kaleidoscopic massacre, we shall use the translation of Cowper. We know from Cowper's correspondence that he had a special admiration of the passage— he quotes it (with apology) in the original Greek, to his correspondent, and remarks upon it thus, "Beautiful as well for the affecting nature of the observation as for the justness of the comparison and the incomparable simplicity of the expression." Now we almost feel that so much introduction will have prepared our readers only for disappointment in seeing the lines themselves. Undoubtedly the lines do derive much of their effectiveness from the setting in which they occur. But at any rate here they are, in Cowper's rendering, better for this once than Bryant's:

Why asks brave Diomed of my descent?

For, as the leaves, such is the race of man.

The wind shakes down the leaves, the budding grove
Soon teems with others, and in spring they grow.

So pass mankind. One generation meets

Its destined period, and a new succeeds.

More tinklingly, in his fatally facile heroic rhyme, Pope renders:

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;
Another race the following spring supplies,

They fall successive, and successive rise:

So generations in their course decay,

So flourish these, when those have passed away.

No one can dispute the merit of Pope's Homer as a marvel of literary workmanship. Bentley, however, an English scholar of Pope's time, a scholar, too, unsurpassed in the annals of modern scholarship, expressed the general opinion of competent authorities as to Pope's fidelity to the Greek, when he bluntly said to the translator himself, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." In comparison with this celebrated sentence of Bentley's on Pope's work, put the following expression of John Foster's, written by him in his early manhood, while therefore the influence of Pope's literary school was naturally still strong upon him, that influence being not yet counterworked in the public mind, as afterward it was to be, by Thomson first, then by Cowper, and finally by Wordsworth. Foster writes to a friend, in 1791: "Perhaps you have seen Cowper's Homer. I still cannot but wish that he had been differently employed. On reading a few passages I thought, This may possibly be Homer himself, but, if it is, Pope is a greater poet than Homer."

The foregoing lines from Homer, by the way, must call to every reader's mind, Isaiah's "We all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away." Isaiah's comparison is, however, not quite the same as Homer's. Homer's is larger, less obvious, more elaborate. There is more imagination in it. Isaiah was intent on a moral aim. He was a prophet. Homer was only a poet. It is sentiment on the part of the Greek. It is practical earnestness on the part of the Hebrew. The two contrasted passages well illustrate the difference between what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism on the one hand, and what he calls Hellenism on the other.

It is the antithesis of ethics and aesthetics, of religion and

taste.

The son of Hippolochus, Glaucus is his name, most obligingly enters upon a circumstantial account of his extraction, in the course of which it becomes apparent that these two threatening foes are ancestrally allied to each other as mutual guests, or guest-friends. The upshot is as delightful as it is sudden and unlooked for. "Let us exchange our arms," exclaims the truculent Diomed, effusively,

That even these may see that thou and I
Regard each other as ancestral guests.

It seems that Glaucus's armor was of gold, while Diomed's was of baser brass or bronze; but we will trust that there was no sordid motive of thrift, to alloy the bluff cordiality of the Greek in his proposal of exchange.

Hector, the chief Trojan hero, had retired within the city walls to visit his mother the queen, Priam's consort, for the purpose of engaging her, together with the venerable matrons of Troy, to make supplications and offerings and vows to Minerva on behalf of the beleaguered town. The meeting of the mother and her son is tenderly and beautifully described. Hector confronts Paris, and chides him sharply. There is, too, a meeting of Hector with Helen, in which the heroic brother-in-law bears himself with knightly tenderness toward the self-condemning woman. But what has chiefly impressed itself upon the imagination and the heart of Homer's admirers is the famous passage descriptive of the parting of Hector and Andromache his wife, bringing with her their little child, Hectorides, his infant darling boy, Beautiful as a star,

as Cowper translates with picturesque felicity. (Our readers will, perhaps, by this time have observed that the ending i-des, added to a man's name, has the meaning son of the man so named.) We give the passage, as usual, in Bryant's translation: