So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech. The epithets of the _Iliad_ or the _Beowulf_ are a poetical convention; and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic poets have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told greatly. Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language. That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity” heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to wider import. Aristotle[6] remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius[7] even finds control of rhythms to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication, is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse. (2). _The Conception and Scope of the Æneid_