"That," says Arnold, "is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it." Then he contrasts it with a famous passage in Homer--that same passage which is quoted in the article POETRY, for the very opposite purpose to that of Arnold's, quoted indeed to show how the epic poet, leaving the dramatic action to act as chorus, weakens the [Greek: apatae] of the picture--the passage in the _Iliad_ (iii 243-244) where the poet, after Helen's pathetic mention of her brother's comments on the causes of their absence, "criticizes life" and generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence, the impotence even of human love, to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. He appends Dr Hawtrey's translation:-- [Greek: Os phato roys d ede katechen physizoos aia en Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie.] "So said she; they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon." "We are here," says Arnold, "in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitel gives to the _Chanson de Roland_. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior." He does not see that the two passages cannot properly be compared at all. In the one case the poet gives us a dramatic picture; in the other; a comment on a dramatic picture.