It is, indeed, the strongest and most glowing imaginable, and touched with

the greatest spirit. Aristotle had reason to say, he was the only poet who

had found out "living words;" there are in him more daring figures and

metaphors than in any good author whatever. An arrow is "impatient" to be

on the wing, a weapon "thirsts" to drink the blood of an enemy, and the

like, yet his expression is never too big for the sense, but justly great

in proportion to it. It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the

diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it, for in the same

degree that a thought is warmer, an expression will be brighter, as that

is more strong, this will become more perspicuous; like glass in the

furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, and refines to a greater

clearness, only as the breath within is more powerful, and the heat more

intense.

To throw his language more out of prose, Homer seems to have affected the

compound epithets. This was a sort of composition peculiarly proper to

poetry, not only as it heightened the diction, but as it assisted and

filled the numbers with greater sound and pomp, and likewise conduced in

some measure to thicken the images. On this last consideration I cannot

but attribute these also to the fruitfulness of his invention, since (as

he has managed them) they are a sort of supernumerary pictures of the

persons or things to which they were joined. We see the motion of Hector's

plumes in the epithet Korythaiolos, the landscape of Mount Neritus in that

of Einosiphyllos, and so of others, which particular images could not have

been insisted upon so long as to express them in a description (though but

of a single line) without diverting the reader too much from the principal

The Iliad of Homer