His mother's word; and so, thus standing there, Added a dreadful cry; and there arose Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult. acides. And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one Then perished, crush'd by their own arms and chariots. Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears. The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times, weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, "desire" for his father in his very "limbs." He joins in grief with the venerable sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of "his great head and his grey chin." Observe the exquisite introduction of this last word. It paints the touching fact of the chin's being imploringly thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his beard as he speaks. Ως άρα φωνήσας απέβη προς μακρον Ολυμπον αρα στας Ήρως Αυτομέδων τε και Αλκιμος, οζος Άρηος, Μνησαι πατρος σειο, θεοις επιεικελ' Αχιλλευ, So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven: Holding the mules and horses; and the old man A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been To foreign lands, and comes into the house And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other. Yet when he hears that thou art still alive, He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb; The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd; He ceased; and there arose Sharp longing in Achilles for his father; And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd. His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, if he had thought of it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would have given us too many remarks; the overlyrical, a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the "grey chin," of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero trem. ble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling; though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth into their hearts. The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional meta. phor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison's Cato is full of them. Passion unpitied and successless love I've sounded my Numidians, man by man, The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex. Of the same kind is his "courting the yoke"-" distracting my very heart"-" calling up all" one's "father" in one's soul"working every nerve"-" copying a bright example;" in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's time,-the Mariamne of Fenton : Mariamne, with superior charms, In her young lover's soul; a winning grace "Triumphing o'er reason" is an old acquaintance of every. body's. "Paradise in her look " is from the Italian poets through Dryden. "Fair as the first idea," &c., is from Milton spoilt ; "winning grace" and "steps" from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt; just as when a great writer borrows, he improves. To come now to Fancy,—she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations. |