Part 86 (1/1)

399

294 Milton has rivalled this passage describing the descent of Gabriel, ”Paradise Lost,” bk v 266, seq

”Down thither prone in flight He speeds, and through the vast ethereal sky Sails betorlds and worlds, with steady wing, Now on the polar winds, then with quick fan Winnows the buxom air

At once on th' eastern cliff of Paradise He lights, and to his proper shape returns A seraph wing'd

Like Maia's son he stood, And shook his plurance fill'd The circuit wide”

Virgil, aen iv 350:--

”Her feet, and mounts the western winds: And whether o'er the seas or earth he flies, With rapid force they bear hirasps within his awful hand The ic wand; With this he draws the ghost froian waves:

Thus ar clouds along the liquid space”

Dryden

295 In reference to the whole scene that follows, the re:--

”By a close study of life, and by a true and natural , Homer was enabled to venture upon the most peculiar and difficult situations, and to extricate himself from them with the completest success The whole scene between Achilles and Priam, when the latter co the body of Hector, is at once the most profoundly skilful, and yet the sie in the Iliad Quinctilian has taken notice of the following speech of Priam, the rhetorical artifice of which is so transcendent, that if genius did not often, especially in oratory, unconsciously fulfil the ht be induced, on this account alone, to consider the last book of the Iliad as what is called spurious, in other words, of later date than the rest of the poe the e of his father; in gradually introducing the parallel of his own situation; and, lastly,Hector's name when he perceives that the hero is softened, and then only in such a o d'eleeinoteros per, and the apusato aecha geronta, are not exactly like the tone of the earlier parts of the Iliad They are ale defies translation, for there is that about the Greek which has no name, but which is of so fine and ethereal a subtlety that it can only be felt in the original, and is lost in an attee, p 195

296 ”Achilles' ferocious treatment of the corpse of Hector cannot but offend as referred to the e, however, eance on the dead, as well as the living, was a duty inculcated by the religion of those barbarous tiht that evil inflicted on the author of evil was a solace to the injured man; but made the welfare of the soul after death dependent on the fate of the body from which it had separated Hence a denial of the rites essential to the soul's adions of the loorld was a cruel punishment to the wanderer on the dreary shores of the infernal river The cohost of Patroclus to Achilles, of but a brief postponement of his own obsequies, sho efficacious their refusal to the re the thirst of revenge, which, even after death, was supposed to tor up the body of Hector to Priam, Achilles asks pardon of Patroclus for even this partial cession of his just rights of retribution”--Mure, vol i 289

297 Such was the fate of Astyanax, when Troy was taken

”Here, from the tow'r by stern Ulysses thrown, Andromache bewail'd her infant son”

Merrick's Tryphiodorus, v 675

298 The following observations of Coleridge furnish aview of Helen's character--

”Few things are iven us the fury and inconsistency of Achilles, gives us also the consuh the Iliad a genuine lady, graceful in motion and speech, noble in her associations, full of reher powers seerateful and affectionate towards those hoht the following speech in which Helen laments Hector, and hints at her own invidious and unprotected situation in Troy, as ale in the poe instance of that refineenerally distinguish the last book of the Iliad from the rest”--Classic Poets, p 198, seq

299 ”And here we part with Achilles at the moment best calculated to exalt and purify our ih the effervescence, undulations, and final subsidence of his stormy passions We now leave him in repose and under the full influence of the reat qualities is chastened by the reflection that, within a few short days thein whom they were united was hiour of their exercise

The frequent and touching allusions, interspersed throughout the Iliad, to the speedy termination of its hero's course, and the moral on the vanity of hu the finest evidences of the spirit of ethic unity by which the whole framework of the poem is united”--Mure, vol i p 201

300 Cowper says,--”I cannot takehow much I am struck with the plain conclusion of it It is like the exit of a great nificently; neither pompous nor fae, p 227, considers the termination of ”Paradise Lost” somewhat similar