Greece has no poet worthy to be compared with our Shakespeare and our Milton but Homer, who possesses some advantages over them both. Shakespeare, buoyant and full of life as was his spirit, felt evidently the waves of his imagination lapse at times from about him and leave his mind stranded and bare on the shores of the immeasurable universe. Melancholy creeps over him, like a black vapour, concealing the Titanian head wont to tower above the region of the clouds. Even over Milton’s soul, serene in its fiery brightness as it usually is, I think I discover something which at times obscures his faith in himself and human nature, and produces a flagging of the fancy. But in Homer this never appears. Cheerfully and joyously he pursues his course with eternal sunshine on his brow, and a heart beating full and true, as if the life of all the world were within him. There is no end of his vitality. He seems as if he could never grow old. His strength is inexhaustible. Equal to whatever may happen, he nowhere seems to be hurried by his subject, or compelled to strain a nerve to accomplish what he desires. In himself he appears happy as a god, and only to sympathise in human suffering from the boundlessness of his charity. He comes forth as the sun in the morning, full of brightness, showing all the tears that sprinkle the earth and drying them too, but shedding none. We call him old, though in reality he is all youthfulness and love. Every function of life goes on harmoniously in his frame. He enjoys whatever nature brings within the circle of his experience. He drinks in with rapture the freshness of dawn,—basks smilingly in the blaze of noon,—welcomes the stillness of evening—the solemn grandeur of night. Sleep, too, has for him inexpressible charms, and on the pleasures we taste among its bowers he has bestowed every grateful, every endearing epithet. Milton is far more spiritual, and careers in a course nearer the stars. Shakespeare, in his metaphysical subtlety and yearning to pierce beyond the grave, suggests stranger thoughts, and calls up a wilder world of fancies. But Homer, as if admitted behind the veil, never doubts for a moment. Habitually, too, his thoughts are of action, of man as he is, of the virtue of the citizen, of the soldier, of the husband, of the father, of the son, of the wife. He loved the world and all that it contains. His eye could detect beauty where the atrabilious sceptic beholds nothing but deformity.