Chapters on the poets of ancient Greece Author:Henry Alford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL HOMER. 11 He cometb to you with words set in delightful proportion, cither accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of music, ... more »and with a tale forsooth he cometh to you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner." These, reader, are the words of Sir Philip Sidney, in his Origin of Defence of Poesie; and well do they fit the greatest of all poets, who is the subject of our present chapter. HOMER, he this the name of an individual or a family, one in many, or many in one, arose in the Asiatic provinces of Greece. Of those countries Herodotus has said, that no part of the earth which he knew was so blessed in soil and climate. So that the fairest land nursed the first Poet. Many are the venerable traditions and associations which opinions crowd up around this name—HOMER. Some have repre- them sented him as an ancient bard, blind and poor, wandering from city to city, and earning subsistence by his power of song. Others have supposed that this description merely characterises a whole band of Homeric minstrels, by whose joint labour the poems were produced, sung, and delivered down to the memory of their itinerant successors. Others again have thought and laboured to prove that Homer was identical with, or close in descent from, one of his own heroes. It is enough for us, in an essay like the present, to observe, that the origin of the Homeric poems may be regarded by our readers as wrapped in obscurity, to be penetrated only by the strength of internal evidence, and that evidence not yet fully Date of his poem. History of them. understood. Their Asiatic origin and extreme antiquity is perhaps all that can be unquestionably decided. Now these poems are said by Herodotus, the father of Grecian...« less