And Most Of All,
How He Rejoices When The God Of War Flies Howling From The Spear Of
Diomed, And Mounts Into Heaven For Safety!
Then the beautiful
episode of the Sixth Book:
The way to feel this is not to go
casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to
admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but
pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their
talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy
has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the
nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at
the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's
poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad,
that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his
mother's shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he
goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never
remitting his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for
sorrow - the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the
noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.
Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come
closing over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by
Jove, at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your
mother's dressing-room to a buzzing school.
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