the singing of the arrows, the hurtling of spears, the rain of
stones from the Locrian slings. And shields are smitten, and
chariot-horses run wild with no man to drive them, and Sarpedon
drags down a portion of the Achaean battlement, and Aias leaps into
the trench with his deadly spear, and the whole battle shifts and
shines beneath the sun. Yet he who sings of the war, and sees it
with his sightless eyes, sees also the Trojan women working at the
loom, cheating their anxious hearts with broidery work of gold and
scarlet, or raising the song to Athene, or heating the bath for
Hector, who never again may pass within the gates of Troy. He sees
the poor weaving woman, weighing the wool, that she may not defraud
her employers, and yet may win bread for her children. He sees the
children, the golden head of Astyanax, his shrinking from the
splendour of the hero's helm. He sees the child Odysseus, going
with his father through the orchard, and choosing out some apple
trees "for his very own." It is in the mouth of the ruthless
Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands
of death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes.
"Wherefore weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that
runs by her mother's side, praying her mother to take her up,
snatching at her gown, and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully
looking at her till her mother takes her up?--like her, Patroclus,
dost thou softly weep."

This is what Chesterfield calls "the porter-like language of Homer's
heroes." Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and
all things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved
when the great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after
twenty years, but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome.
With all this love of the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on