them all with a beauty and an interest more than the eye discovers. Seen through her as an imaginative transparency, they become spiritualized; in fact, she and they alike become the symbols and expression of the sentiment which pervades the poem a sentiment broad and deep as the world. And yet, any one who visits these scenes in a mellow autumnal day, will feel that she is no alien or adventitious image, imported by the caprice of the poet, but one altogether native to the place, one which gathers up and concentrates all the undefined spirit and sentiment which lie spread around it. She both glorifies the scenery by her presence, and herself seems to be a natural growth of the scenery, so that it finds in her its most appropriate utterance. This power of imagination to divine and project the very corporeal image, which suits and expresses the spirit of a scene, Wordsworth has many times shown. Notably, for instance, do those ghostly shapes, which might meet at noontide under the dark dome of the fraternal yews of Borrowdale, embody the feeling awakened when one stands there. But never perhaps has he shown this embodying power of imagination more felicitously than when he made the White Doe the ideal exponent of the scenery, the memories, and the sympathies which cluster around Bolton Priory.

One more thing I would notice. While change, destruction, and death overtake everything else in the poem, they do not touch this sylvan creature. So entirely has the poet's imagination transfigured her, that she is no longer a mere thing of flesh, but has become an image of the mind, and taken to herself the permanence of an ideal existence. This is expressed in the concluding lines.

And so the poem has no definite end, but passes off, as it were, into the illimitable. It rises out of the perturbations of time and transitory things, and, passing upward itself, takes our thoughts with it, to calm places and eternal sunshine.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE HOMERIC SPIRIT IN WALTER SCOTT.

THE poetry of Scott is so familiar to all men from their childhood, the drift of it is so obvious, the meaning seems to lie so entirely on the surface, that it may appear as if nothing more could be said about it, nothing which every one did not already know. In the memory of most men it almost blends with their nursery rhymes; their childhood listened to it, their boyhood revelled in it; but when they came to manhood they desired, perhaps, to put aside such simple things, and to pass on to something more subtle and reflective. Yet if we consider the time at which this poetry ap peared, the conditions of the age which produced it, the great background of history out of which it grew, and to which it gave new meaning and interest if we further compare it with poetry of a like nature belonging to other nations and ages, and see its likeness to, and its difference from, their minstrelsies, we shall perhaps perceive that it has another import and a higher value than we suspected. As sometimes happens with persons who have been born and have always lived amid beautiful scenery, that they know not how beautiful their native district is till they have travelled abroad, and found few other regions that may compare with it, so I think it is with the poetry of Scott. We have been so long familiar with it, that we hardly know how unique it is, how truly great.

A wide knowledge of the poetry of all ages and nations, so far from depreciating the value of Scott's minstrelsy, will only enhance it in our eyes. When we come to know that many nations which possess an abundant literature have nothing answering to the poetry of Scott, that all the national literatures, ancient and modern, which the world has produced, can only show a very few specimens of poetry of this order, and these separated from each other by intervals of centuries, we shall then perhaps learn to prize, more truly and intelligently, the great national inheritance which Scott has bequeathed to us in his poetic romances.

It might be too great a shock to the nerves of critics to assert that Scott is distinctively and peculiarly a great epic poet. But even the strictest criticism must allow that, whatever other elements of interest his poems possess, they contain more of the Homeric or epic element than any other poems in the English language. If, to a reader who could read no other language than his own, I wished to convey an impression of what Homer was like, I should say let him read the more heroic parts of Scott's poems, and from these he would gather some insight into the Homeric spirit; inadequate, no doubt, meagre, some might perhaps say, yet true it would be, as far as it goes.

First, then, let us ask what is meant by an epic poem. Aristotle has answered this question in the Poetics, and the definition he there gives holds good to this day. Its substance has been thus condensed by Mr. Thomas Arnold in his interesting Manual of English Literature: "The subject of the epic poem must be some one, great, complex action. The principal personages must belong to the high places of the world,

and must be grand and elevated in their ideas and in their bearing. The measure must be of a sonorous dignity, befitting the subject. The action is carried on by a mixture of narrative, dialogue, and soliloquy. Briefly to express its main requisites, the epic poem treats of one great, complex action, in a grand style and with fulness of detail."

Few European nations possess more than one real epic some great nations possess none. The Iliad, the Eneid, the Niebelungen Lied, the Jerusalem Delivered, and Paradise Lost, these are the recognized great epics of the world. It was the fashion in the last century to institute elaborate comparisons between some of them, as though they were all poems of exactly the same order. So much was this the case that Addison in the Spectator wrote a series of papers, in which he compares the Iliad, the Eneid, and Paradise Lost, first, with respect to the choice of subject, secondly, to the mode of treatment; and in both respects he gives the palm to Milton. And so little was the essential difference between Homer and Milton perceived up to the very end of last century, that so genuine a poet as Cowper, when he set himself to translate Homer, chose as his vehicle the blank verse of Milton. Grand, impressive, but elaborate, involved, full of "inversion and pregnant conciseness," as Milton's verse is, nothing in the world could be a more unfit medium for conveying to the English reader the general effect produced by the direct, rapid, easy-flowing yet dignified narrative of Homer. As Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, "Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought; he is also, and above all, noble." Between the popular epic and the literary epic