THE flight of cranes, murmur of bees that from their hollows in the rocks seek the spring flowers, swarming of flies to the spring milk, the west wind waving the grain, and the east and south raising the waves of the Icarian Sea; man, conscious of beauty in the world around, labouring upon the soil, tending his herds, labouring at the loom, the forge, the potter’s wheel, and by the work of his hands adding new beauty; man, worshipping on hills and heaths the powers of Nature; sacrificing to the power of the air by lifting the bead of the ox, and causing the blood of sacrifice to spirt towards the sky, sacrificing to the power of the sea by slaying the victim where its blood reddens the wave, and to the power of the under-world by making the blood pour from the lowered neck into a hollow of the ground; each warrior-chief his people’s priest, earth,- sea, and air, temple and Gods in one; the wealth and the worship of Nature, were in Homer’s world. It was still night over Europe. Our earliest rays of intellectual light were yet to spread along the shores of the Mediterranean from that dawn in the east which first shone upon Greece.

Close to the source of light, closer than men of Attic or Achaian Greece, were the kindred people on the isles and mainland of that Asian shore to which afterwards the Greeks across the sea sent colonies. Here, in a far past to which we can assign no date, perhaps in the island of Chios, by the coast of Lydia, Homer lived. The energies of man, much occupied with strife, were shaping, under happiest conditions of race, soil, and climate, a new civilisation, and fame of the deeds of heroes spread by song. Of Homer it has been inferred, from degrees of local knowledge observed in his characters of places, that his travels on the Asian mainland may not have reached farther than Sardes, but that he must at least have voyaged among the Sporades by Icaria, Cos, Nisyrus, Rhodos, and across by Carpathos to Crete; again also across the Thracian Sea to Euboea; and from Euboea through some parts of Greece in Europe. He sang by the way, doubtless, but not as others sang; for he first in Europe was a Master Poet, born to gather, as into one thought, the young life of his time. It was a time rich in all natural forces that can sway the minds of men, rich also in minds that sought in their turn to rule Nature. The expedition against Troy – which Dr. Schliemann’s late researches prove to be no fiction, though the poet dealt with it according to his art – was matter for heroic song that called the Greeks to brotherhood, showing the strength of union and perils of ungoverned wrath.

The true Master Poet speaks from all the depths of all the life he knows. The power of the Iliad lies partly in the fulness of its dealing with all elemental forces in the life of man, showing them stirred with immense energy under conditions of an early civilisation, newly passed out of Asia into Greece and Italy, from which the poet himself drew all his experience and all his illustrations. But the main strength of the poem lies in the handling and the moulding of this matter by the spiritual power that was in Homer himself, and which he had in common with the prophets and the poets who seek to uplift the soul of man. As Master Poet, by this power he shaped all into the clearest truth his age could see, and to a form of art that no age has excelled.

The highest art must spring inevitably from the working of true genius on the essentials of life, with deepest sincerity and highest aim. All lower forms of art are successful in proportion to their power of producing colour¬able imitations of such work. Rules of art are but compiled observations of the characters inseparable from each form of work so done. Thus Homer’s art could be as true as Shakespeare’s, and one or other of these might become the Prince of Poets, and the greatest artist in the world, without help from the schools.

The Iliad, said Aristotle, is pathetic and simple; the Odyssey is ethical and mixed. In the Iliad Homer dealt simply with the strong passions of life; in the Odyssey he gave beautiful shapes to the calm wisdom of maturer years. There is a relation like that of Iliad to Odyssey between Milton’s Paradise Lost and his Paradise Regained, between Fielding’s Tom Jones and his Amelia. The relation is one natural to successive