“On First Looking Into Chapman’s ‘Homer,’” by John Keats (1795-1821). 
 The last four lines of this sonnet form the most tremendous climax in literature.  The picture is as vivid as if done with a brush.  Every great book, every great poem is a new world, an undiscovered country. 
 Every learned person is a whole territory, a universe of new thought. 
 Every one who does anything with a heart for it, every specialist every one, however simple, who is strenuous and genuine, is a “new discovery.”  Let us give credit to the smallest planet that is true to its own orbit.

    Much have I travelled 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
    Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—­
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

JOHN KEATS.

 HERVE RIEL.

“Herve Riel” (by Robert Browning, 1812-89) is a poem for older boys. 
 Here is a hero who does a great deed simply as a part of his day’s work.  He puts no value on what he has done, because he could have done no other way.

On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two,
Did the English fight the French—­woe to France! 
And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue,
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance,
With the English fleet in view.

’Twas the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full chase,
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Damfreville;
Close on him fled, great and small,
Twenty-two good ships in all;
And they signalled to the place,
“Help the winners of a race! 
Get us guidance, give us harbour, take us quick—­or, quicker still,
Here’s the English can and will!”

Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leaped on board: 
“Why, what hope or chance have ships like these to pass?”
laughed they;
“Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage scarred
and scored,
Shall the Formidable here, with her twelve and eighty guns,
Think to make the river-mouth by the single narrow way,
Trust to enter where ’tis ticklish for a craft of twenty tons. 
And with flow at full beside? 
Now ’tis slackest ebb of tide. 
Reach the mooring!  Rather say,
While rock stands or water runs,
Not a ship will leave the bay!”