repeat himself, because there were not enough hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous burden.  He had Golconda at the root of his tongue:  let him but pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.  A plethora, some have said:  never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it all.  Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer, with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.

Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you a resounding glory.  What means this most familiar one, think you: 

     Ten d’apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?

—­Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed?  But no; it means:  “Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted Hector;” or tout simplement, ‘Hector answered.’  And hardly can anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums: 

     Ton d’emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon. 
     Hos phato.  Ten d’outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus

—­whereafter at seven lines down we get again: 

     Ten de meg’ ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;

—­in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and unskill.  It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators, whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear.  But you will remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound.  So he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer’s—­would still be greater, could we be sure of Homer’s tones and vowel-values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the Soul and the Eternal.

Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly.  If it is true that his reputation gains on the principle of Omne ignotum pro magnifico—­because he is unknown to most that praise him—­let none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry.  His faults—­to call them that—­are such as you would expect from his age, race, and peculiar historic position; his virtues are drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from the Unfathomable that flowed through him.  He had the high serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them highly, deeply and seriously.  We may compare him to Dante:  who also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with