BULLER.

Would his lordship were with us!

NORTH.

Give all this to-THE HEXAMETER. Remember always, my dear Seward, the shield of Achilles-itself a world in miniature-a compendium of the world.

Of the universe.

SEWARD.

NORTH.

Even so; for Sun, and Moon, and Stars are there, Astronomy and all the learned sisterhood!

SEWARD.

Then to what species of narrative in prose-to one removed at what interval from the history of the Peloponnesian War, belongs that scene of Helen on the Walls of Troy? That scene at the Scean gate? In the tent of Achilles, where Achilles sits, and Priam kneels?

NORTH.

Good. The general difference is obviously this-Publicity almost solely stamps the Thucydidean story-Privacy, more than in equal part, interfused with Publicity, the Homeric. You must allow Publicity and Privacy to signify, besides that which is done in public and in private, that which proceeds of the Public and of the Private will.

SEWARD.

In other words, if I apprehend you aright, the Theme given being some affair of Public moment, Prose tends to gather up the acts of the individual agents, under general aspects, into masses.

NORTH.

Just so. Verse, whenever it dare, resolves the mass of action into the individual acts, puts aside the collective doer-the Public, and puts forward individual persons. Glory, I say again, to THE HEXAMETER !

BULLER.

Glory to the HEXAMETER! The HEXAMETER, like the Queen, has done it all.

NORTH.

Or let us return to the Paradise Lost? If the mustering of the Fallen Legions in the First Book-if the Infernal Council held in the Second-if the Angelic Rebellion and Warfare in the Fifth and Sixth-resemble Public History, civil and military, as we commonly speak-if the Seventh Book, relating the Creation by describing the kinds created, be the assumption into Heroic Poetry of Natural History-to what kind of History, I earnestly ask you both, does that scene belong, of Eve's relation of her dream, in the Fifth Book, and Adam's consolation of her uneasiness under its involuntary sin? To what, in the Fourth Book, her own innocent relation of her first impressions upon awaking into Life and Consciousness?

BULLER.

Ay!-to what kind of History? More easily asked than answered.

NORTH.

And Adam's relation to the Affable Archangel of his own suddenly-dawned morning from the night of non-existence, aptly and happily crowned upon the relation made to him by Raphael in the Seventh Book of his own forming under the Omnipotent Hand?

SEWARD.

Simply, I venture to say, sir, to the most interior autobiography-to that confidence of audible words, which flows when the face of a friend sharpens the heart of a man-and Raphael was Adam's Friend.

NORTH.

Seward, you are right. You speak well-as you always do-when you choose. Behold, then, I beseech you, the comprehending power of that little magical band-Our Accentual Iambic Pentameter.

SEWARD.

"Glory be with them, and eternal praise,

The Poets who on earth have made us heirs
Of Truth and pure Delight by heavenly lays!"

NORTH.

Glory to Verse, for its power is great. Man, from the garden in Eden, to the purifying by fire of the redeemed Earth-the creation of things Visible-Angels Upright and Fallen-and Higher than Angels-all the Regions of SpaceInfinitude and Eternity-the Universality of Being--this is the copious matter of the Song. And herein there is place found, proper, distinct, and large, and prominent, for that whispered call to visit, in the freshness of morning, the dropping Myrrh-to study the opening beauty of the Flowers-to watch the Bee in her sweet labour-which tenderly dissipates from the lids of Eve her ominously-troubled sleep-free room for two tears, which, falling from a woman's eyes, are wiped with her hair-and for two more, which her pitying husband kisses away ere they fall. All these things Verse disposes, and composes, in One Presentment.

BULLER.

Glory to Verse, for its power is great-glory to our Accentual Iambic Pen

tameter.

NORTH.

Let us return to the Iliad. The Iliad is a history told by a mind that is arbiter, to a certain extent only, of its own facts. For Homer takes his decennial War and its Heroes, nay, the tenor of the story too, from long-descended Tradition. To his contemporary countrymen he appears as a Historian-not feigning, but commemorating and glorifying, transmitted facts.

SEWARD.

Ottfried Müller, asking how far Homer is tied up in his Traditions, ventures to suspect that the names of the Heroes whom Achilles kills, in such or such a fight, are all traditionary.

NORTH.

66

Where, then, is the Feigned History? Lord Bacon, Ottfried Müller, and Jacob Bryant, are here not in the main unagreed. I nothing doubt," says Bacon, "but the Fables, which Homer having received, transmits, had originally a profound and excellent sense, although I greatly doubt if Homer any longer knew that sense."

BULLER.

What right, may I ask, had Lord Bacon to doubt, and Ottfried Müller to suspect

Ottfried Müller imagines that there was in Greece a pre-Homeric Age, of which the principal intellectual employment was Myth-making. And Bryant, we know, shocked the opinion of his own day by referring the War of Troy to Mythology. Now, observe, Buller, how there is feigning and feigningPoet after Poet-and the Poem that comes to us at last is the Poem of Homer; but in truth, of successive ages, ending in Homer

SEWARD.

Who was then a real living flesh and blood Individual of the human species.

That he was

NORTH.

SEWARD.

And wrote the Iliad.

NORTH.

That he did-but how I have hinted rather than told. In the Paradise Lost, the part of Milton is, then, infinitely bolder than Homer's in the Iliad. He is far more of a Creator.

SEWARD.

Can an innermost bond of Unity, sir, be shown for the Iliad?

NORTH.

Yes. THE ILIAD IS A TALE OF A WRONG RIGHTED. Zeus, upon the secret top of Olympus, decrees this RIGHTING with his omnipotent Nod. Upon the top of Ida he conducts it. But that is done, and the Fates resume their tenor. Hector falls, and Troy shall fall. That is again the RIGHTING OF A WRONG, done amongst men. This is the broadly-written admonition: "Discri JUSTITIAM."

SEWARD.

You are always great, sir, on Homer.

NORTH.

Agamemnon, in insolence of self-will, offends Chryses and a God. He refused Chyseis-He robs Achilles. In Agamemnon the Insolence of Human Self-will is humbled, first under the hand of Apollo-then of Jupiter-say. altogether, of Heaven. He suffers and submits. And now Achilles, who has m less interest in the Courts of Heaven than Chryses-indeed higher-in overweening anger fashions out a redress for himself which the Father of Gods and Men grants. And what follows? Agamemnon again suffers and submits. For Achilles-Patroclus' bloody corse! Keira Пaтpokλos-that is the voice that rings! Now he accepts the proffered reconciliation of Agamemnon, before scornfully refused; and in the son of Thetis, too, the Insolence of Human Self-will is chastened under the hand of Heaven.

SEWARD.

He suffers, but submits not till Hector lies transfixed-till Twelve noble youths of the Trojans and their Allies have bled on Patroclus' Pyre. And does he submit then? No. For twelve days ever and anon he drags the insensible corse at his horses' heels round that sepulchral earth.

Mad, if ever a man was.

BULLER.

NORTH.

The Gods murmur-and will that the unseemly Revenge cease. Jove sends Thetis to him-and what meeter messenger for minister of mercy than a mother to her son! God-bidden by that voice, he submits-he remits his Revenge. The Human Will, infuriated, bows under the Heavenly.

SEWARD.

Touched by the prayers and the sight of that kneeling gray-haired Father, he has given him back his dead son-and from the ransom a costly pall of honour, to hide the dead son from the father's eyes-and of his own Will and Power Twelve Days' truce; and the days have expired, and the Funeral is performed-and the pyre is burned out-and the mound over the slayer of Patroclus is heaped-and the Iliad is done-and this Moral indelibly writes itself on the heart-the words of Apollo in that Council

Τλητον γας θυμον Μοίραι Θνητοίσιν έδωκαν.

THE FATES HAVE APPOINTED TO MORTALS A SPIRIT THAT SHALL SUBMIT AND

ENDURE.

NORTH.

Right and good. Tanrov is more than "shall suffer." It is, that shall accept suffering-that shall bear.

SEWARD.

Compare this one Verse and the Twenty-four Books, and you have the poetical simplicity and the poetical multiplicity side by side.

Right and good.

BULLER.

NORTH.

Yes, my friends, the Teaching of the Iliad is Piety to the Gods

SEWARD.

Reverence for the Rights of Men

NORTH.

A Will humbled, conformed to the Will of Heaven

BULLER.

That the Earth is justly governed.

NORTH.

Dim foreshadowings, which Milton, I doubt not, discerned and cherished. The Iliad was the natural and spiritual father of the Paradise Lost

SEWARD.

And the son is greater than the sire.

NORTH.

I see in the Iliad the love of Homer to Greece and to humankind. He was a legislator to Greece before Solon and Lycurgus-greater than either-after the manner fabled of Orpheus.

SEWARD.

Sprung from the bosom of heroic life, the Iliad asked heroic listeners.

NORTH.

See with what large-hearted love he draws the Men-Hector, and Priam, and Sarpedon-as well as the Woman Andromache-enemies! Can he so paint humanity and not humanise? He humanises us-who have literature and refined Greece and Rome-who have Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton-who are Christendom.

SEWARD.

He loves the inferior creatures, and the face of nature.

NORTH.

The Iliad has been called a Song of War. I see in it-a Song of Peace. Think of all the fiery Iliad ending in-Reconciled Submission!

SEWARD.

"Murder Impossibility," and believe that there might have been an Iliad or a Paradise Lost in Prose.

NORTH.

It could never have been, by human power, our Paradise Lost. What would have become of the Seventh Book? This is now occupied with describing the Six Days of Creation. A few verses of the First Chapter of Genesis extended into so many hundred lines. The Book, as it stands, has full poetical reason. First, it has a sufficient motive. It founds the existence of Adam and Eve, which is otherwise not duly led to. The revolted Angels, you know, have fallen, and the Almighty will create a new race of worshippers to supply their place—Mankind.

SEWARD.

For this race that is to be created, a Home is previously to be built-or this World is to be created.

NORTH.

I initiated you into Milton nearly thirty years ago, my dear Seward; and I rejoice to find that you still have him by heart. Between the Fall of the Angels, and that inhabiting of Paradise by our first parents, which is largely related by Raphael, there would be in the history which the poem undertakes, an unfilled gap and blank without this book. The chain of events which is unrolled would be broken-interrupted-incomplete.

SEWARD.

And, sir, when Raphael has told the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels, Adam, with a natural movement of curiosity, asks of this "Divine Interpreter" how this frame of things began?

NORTH.

And Raphael answers by declaring at large the Purpose and the Manner. The Mission of Raphael is to strengthen, if it be practicable, the Human Pair in their obedience. To this end, how apt his discourse, showing how dear they are to the Universal Maker, how eminent in his Universe!

SEWARD.

The causes, then, of the Archangelic Narrative abound. And the personal interest with which the Two Auditors must hear such a revelation of wonders from such a Speaker, and that so intimately concerns themselves, falls nothing short of what Poetry justly requires in relations put into the mouth of the poetical Persons.

NORTH.

And can the interest-not now of Raphael's, but of Milton's "fit audience" -be sustained throughout? The answer is triumphant. The Book is, from beginning to end, a stream of the most beautiful descriptive Poetry that exists. Not however, mind you, Seward, of stationary description.

Sir?

SEWARD.

NORTH.

A proceeding work is described; and the Book is replete and alive with motion-with progress-with action-yes, of action-of an order unusual indeed to the Epos, but unexcelled in dignity—the Creative Action of Deity!

SEWARD.

What should hinder, then, but that this same Seventh Book should have been written in Prose?

NORTH.

Why this only-that without Verse it could not have been read! The Verse makes present. You listen with Adam and Eve, and you hear the Archangel. In Prose this illusion could not have been carried through such a subject-matter. The conditio sine quâ non of the Book was the ineffable charm of the Description. But what would a series of botanical and zoological descriptions, for instance, have been, in Prose? The vivida vis that is in Verse is the quickening spirit of the whole.

But who doubts it?

BULLER.

NORTH.

Lord Bacon said that Poetry-that is, Feigned History-might be worded in Prose. And it may be; but how inadequately is known to Us Three.

And to all the world.

BULLER.

NORTH.

No--nor, to the million who do know it, so well as to Us, nor the reason why. But hear me a moment longer. Wordsworth, in his famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, asserts that the language of Prose and the language of Verse differ but in this-that in verse there is metre-and metre he calls an adjunct. With all reverence, I say that metre is not an adjunct--but vitality and essence; and that verse, in virtue thereof, so transfigures language, that it ceases to be the language of prose as spoken, out of verse, by any of the children of men.

SEWARD.

Remove the metre, and the language will not be the language of prose ?

NORTH.

Not if you remove the metre only-and leave otherwise the order of the words-the collocation unchanged-and unchanged any one of the two hundred figures of speech, one and all of which are differently presented in the language of Verse from what they are in Prose.

It must be so.

SEWARD.

NORTH.

The fountain of Law to Composition in Prose is the Understanding. The fountain of Law to Composition in Verse is the Will.

A discourse in prose resembles a chain. The sentences are the successive links-all holding to one another—and holding one another. All is bound.

Well?

SEWARD.

NORTH.

A discourse in verse resembles a billowy sea. The verses are the waves that rise and fall-to our apprehension--each by impulse, life, will of its own. All is free.