2. POEMS OF HOMER.--Although seven cities contended for the honor of giving birth to Homer, it was the prevalent belief, in the flourishing times of Greece, that he was a native of Smyrna. He was probably born in that city about 1000 B.C. Little is known of his life, but the power of his transcendent genius is deeply impressed upon his works. He was called by the Greeks themselves, _the poet_; and the Iliad and the Odyssey were with them the ultimate standard of appeal on all matters of religious doctrine and early history. They were learned by boys at school, and became the study of men in their riper years, and in the time of Socrates there were Athenians who could repeat both poems by heart. In whatever part of the world a Greek settled, he carried with him a love for the great poet, and long after the Greek people had lost their independence, the Iliad and the Odyssey continued to maintain an undiminished hold upon their affections. The peculiar excellence of these poems lies in their sublimity and pathos, in their tenderness and simplicity, and they show in their author an inexhaustible vigor, that seems to revel in an endless display of prodigious energies. The universality of the powers of Homer is their most astonishing attribute. He is not great in any one thing; he is greatest in all things. He imagines with equal ease the terrible, the beautiful, the mean, the loathsome, and he paints them all with equal force. In his descriptions of external nature, in his exhibitions of human character and passion, no matter what the subject, he exhausts its capabilities. His pictures are true to the minutest touch; his men and women are made of flesh and blood. They lose nothing of their humanity for being cast in a heroic mould. He transfers himself into the identity of those whom he brings into action; masters the interior springs of their spiritual mechanism; and makes them move, look, speak, and do exactly as they would in real life.