These, and such lines as these, infringe upon sense and soul like a cannon-ball, and bury themselves so deeply in the memory that they cannot be unearthed. Then, too, Mr. Rossetti is a master of monosyllabic words, generally so hazardous both to dignity and grace, and uses them freely, often through a whole line, and sometimes through two consecutive lines, and even into a third, with no loss, but a clear gain of both literary and emotional effect. These may seem trivial things; but those to whom poetry is an art as well as an inspiration know that nothing is trivial which can be used as a means for stamping fine and enduring impressions. There was inspiration enough and to spare for the tuneful breath to which we listen in such sonnets as Love-sight, Love-sweetness, Winged Hours, Secret Parting, and Mary Magdalene; but inspiration alone would never have realized their accomplished perfectness. It is the inspiration that masters us in such intense and somber utterances as Vain Virtues, The Sun's Shame, The Refusal of Aid between Nations, and the great and terrible Lost Days; but it is art which assures to inspiration the mastery. The man who wrote the sonnet For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione, which for beauty, pure, absolute, inviolate, has no equal in the volumes of any English poet, is above all things an artist; and for sonnet craftsmanship which realizes the ideal, which leaves us with the pleasant languor of supreme satisfaction, the delicious drowsiness of fulfilled delight, we know of nothing comparable to these great gifts which we owe to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

We here necessarily conclude our survey of the history of "The Sonnet in England." Our task has been a pleasant one, for the record is one of continued and beautiful growth. There seemed little promise in the Italian exotic which Sir Thomas Wyat planted in English soil, but it has flourished and blossomed and borne fruit abundantly. Arbitrary as is the form of the sonnet, its arbitrariness must be in accord with great expressional laws, or so many poets would not have chosen it as the vehicle for their finest fancies, their loftiest thoughts, their intensest emotions. This choice, made so often and vindicated so splendidly, has produced a literature within a literature, a domain within a domain, and though it is composed of scanty plots of ground, they spread over a wide expanse through which we may wander long, and yet leave many of its flowers unseen and unculled. Rich as the sonnet literature of England is now, it is becoming every day richer and fuller of potential promise, and though the possibilities of the form may be susceptible of exhaustion, there are no present signs of it, but only of new and

bounteous developments. Even were no addition made to the store which has accumulated through more than two centuries, the sonnet work of our English poets would remain forever one of the most precious of the intellectual possessions of the nation.

JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE, in The Contemporary Review.

LIFE IN THE HOMERIC AGE.*

WHETHER Homer ever existed or not, whether the life described in the Homeric poems is a reality of earth or the fabric of a vision, are questions which may be left to serious moments; when we read Homer for enjoyment we may still believe in the blind old man as a creature of flesh and blood, and look on Nausicaa's game at ball as a form of amusement current in some early "Prehellenic" period. We may do this with a good conscience. For in any case there is and must be a large amount of realism in Homer; whatever the origin of the poems, the poets who composed them were the children of their days, with imaginations more or less limited by what they saw and knew of the world around them, or heard of as belonging to the past. Realism of this kind is inseparable from all poetry. Soar as he will in his imagination, the poet is still rooted to the earth on which he stands. However childlike his audience in an early age may be, he must not go beyond their range, and speak of things which have no meaning and reality for them, or he will cease to give pleasure, and his mission as poet is then at an end. For us, then, the Homeric age may still exist, prehistoric indeed and hardly fixed in locality, but still an age of living men and women, whose joys and sorrows, loves and hates, aspirations and thoughts, have an undying interest.

Though it is the ethical rather than the religious thoughts in the poems which are of abiding value, the religious aspect of the Homeric life is nevertheless a matter of deep interest, because it is in this direction that the first conscious reflection on human existence finds utterance. Man quickly personifies the powers of Nature in some form or another, and begins to ask what is his relation to those powers. He surrounds himself with a multitude of deities, gods of the storm or the clear sky, of growth and decay, of water or fire; and to these forms of the natural world he adds the deified passions of his own nature, gods of war or love. His relations to this multitude of divine powers soon become of a complicated nature. Yet among them there emerge as of the first importance

* Homer's Iliad, translated by Lord Derby.

Homer's Odyssey, translated by P. S. Worsley.

Homer's Odyssey, done into English by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang.

the great facts of life and death, of birth and burial. These are the limits within which all lesser changes, whether in the inward or outward world, take place. Whatever variety there may be in the lives of men, they have all one beginning, one end. Hence, it is natural that, even at an early period of reflection, the power which brings life and death should be regarded as different from other divine powers, and superior to them. And it would be reasonable to suppose that this power should be denoted by words significant of its equal, impartial and unavoidable nature.

""

In Homer we find such a power; the "doom of death which lays men out," "the doom attached to the thread of birth." It is spoken of sometimes as the lot which comes to every man, extending beyond birth and death to the whole of life-its weal or woe-and sometimes as the goddess who apportions this lot. It is denoted sometimes by the word aisa, which seems to mean "equal portion,' sometimes by the word moira, "part," or share;" sometimes we find it spoken of as potmos, that which falls to a man, a metaphorical expression probably derived from the drawing of lots. This Moira, for that is the name by which the power in its highest manifestation is usually known, is the supreme divinity. She is higher than the gods, who may know but cannot thwart her devices; prophets and seers may bring to men a knowledge of their fate, but no one can escape his doom. Nor, on the other hand, can any man be slain before the time appointed for him; this is the thought which nerves the courage of the Trojan hero when he turns away from his sorrowing wife to join the battle.

"In his mother's arms he placed

His child; she to her fragrant bosom clasped,
Smiling through tears; with eyes of pitying love
Hector beheld, and pressed her hand, and thus
Addressed her 'Dearest, wring not thus my heart!
For till my day of destiny is come,

No man shall take my life; and when it comes,
Nor brave, nor coward can escape that day."."

He will not die before the appointed time, and when that time comes, he will not escape his doom. Neither labor nor rest can defer the evil day.

"Alike the idlers and the active die."

"it will come

To the mass of men this day of doom is unknown, when it will come;" but in two instances the secret is partially divulged. Achilles, who is indeed the son of a divine mother, is allowed to know that two fates are in store for him, and to choose between them.

"I by my goddess-mother have been warned
The silver-footed Thetis, that o'er me

A double chance of destiny impends:

If here remaining, round the walls of Troy
I wage the war, I ne'er shall see my home,
But then undying glory shall be mine:

If I return, and see my native land,

My glory all is gone: but length of life

Shall then be mine, and death be long deferred."

It adds to the grandeur of the Grecian hero that he should be allowed his choice, and choose the lot of glory and death, just as in the Odyssey it adds to the nobility of the steadfast Ithacan that he should choose to return home to Penelope through all the threatened perils of the sea rather than abide in a safe and quiet existence with the divine Calypso in her gorgeous island. Life is the first of bless

ings, but life to be a blessing must be free.

In the other instance Helenus, the Trojan seer, bids his brother Hector go fearlessly forth to challenge the noblest of the Achæans to single combat.

"Helenus, the son of Priam, knew

The secret counsel by the gods devised;
And drawing near to Hector, thus he spoke :
'Hector, thou son of Priam, sage as Jove
In council, hearken to a brother's words,
Bid that the Greeks and Trojans all sit down,
And thou defy the boldest of the Greeks
With thee in single combat to contend;
By revelation from the eternal gods

I know that heret ou shalt not meet thy fate." "

Here the ethical effect is just the reverse. For us, at any rate, it takes away somewhat from the bravery and nobleness of Hector that he should challenge the bravest Greek, when well aware that he cannot himself be slain. For us-for whether we are justified in reading so much between the lines is doubtful, and Hector's joy at his brother's suggestion is perhaps no more than a touch of the naïveté so characteristic of Homer.

In another passage, while Zeus and Heré are watching the battle on the plains of Troy, Patroclus and Sarpedon are seen approaching each other. Sarpedon is the beloved son of Zeus, whose doom it is to fall at the hands of Patroclus. The king of heaven is touched with pity at the sight, and hesitates for a moment whether he shall put forth his divine power and save Sarpedon or not. "Woe is me

that it is the doom of Sarpedon to perish at the hands of Patroclus. My heart within me is divided. Shall I take him alive from the battle and place him in the land of Eycia? or shall I suffer him to fall beneath the hands of Patroclus?" Heré replies that if Zeus in tervenes to save his own child, other gods who have sons fighting on the plains of Troy will desire to do the same by them, or chafe at the exemption allowed by Zeus.

"But if thou love him, and thy sou! deplore

His coming doom, yet in the stubborn fight

Leave him beneath Patroclus' hand to fall;
Then when his spirit hath fled, the charge assign
To Death and gentle Sleep, that in their arms
They bear him safe to Lycia's wide-spread plains:
There shall his brethren and his friends perform
His funeral rites, and mounds and columns raise,
The fitting tribute to the mighty dead.'

"Thus she the sire of gods and men complied,
But to the ground some drops of blood let fall,
In honor of his son, whom fate decreed,

Far from his country. on the fertile plains
Of Troy, to perish by Patroclus' hand."

It is not life and death only which are regulated by aisa or moira, for, as has been said, the suffering and joy of a man are part of his doom. Alcinous, the Phæacian king, will convey the sea-worn Odysseus safely home to Ithaca, and there he must suffer" whatever things fate has in store for him." Yet the measure thus dealt out, and even the end of life itself, is not absolutely fixed; the folly and wickedness of men may increase the evil allotted to them at birth, or bring on the day of doom before the appointed time. It was thus that Ægisthus brought upon himself woe beyond what was appointed, because he transgressed with the wife of Agamemnon in spite of the clear monitions of the gods; thus did the folly of the companions of Odysseus in eating the oxen of the sun take from them the safe return to Ithaca which would otherwise have been their lot.

Such in the abstract are some of the most important conditions of the life described to us in Homer. To examine them in detail would be useless, if we expect to find in them anything like a consistent system. They imply a fatalism which is not absolute and a freedom which is limited. Hector tells us plainly: "A man will not die before his day, nor live beyond it," yet gisthus by his crime brought upon himself an early death, and Sarpedon's doom might have been delayed. To the ordinary mortal there is no certain foreknowledge what his doom is; he enjoys a certain freedom from his very ignorance, but a great spirit like Achilles is allowed to know and choose his fate. The mass of men live on from day to day; if it is a man's doom to die, he dies; if he escapes, the day of his doom is not yet. Offenses against a deity may bring punishment, as the companions of Odysseus were punished, but this rule is not maintained consistently angry as Poseidon the sea-god is with Odysseus for blinding the Cyclops, he does not slay him, he only delays his return homeward. Sarpedon and Achilles, though beloved of the gods, perish in their early youth. If there is a growing tendency to believe that life may be shortened by offenses against heaven, there is no reason to believe that piety necessarily brings a long life. The thought of a moral order of the world is perhaps dimly emerging, but as yet it is far off and fragmentary.

These general conditions of life are complicated still more by the