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Pope; the Iliad of Homer, Books I. VI. XXII. XXIV
Pope the Iliad of Homer Books I VI XXII XXIV Author:Homer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: In Kussell's Ancient Europe, a book much used in the last century, there is an abstract of the Iliad, which presents very nearly the outline of an Achilleis, suc... more »h as we have supposed. The heroes are made to speak in a sort of stilted, or at least buskined language, not unsuited to youthful taste: and from the close con- vergement of the separate parts, the interest is condensed. This book, in our eighth year, we read. It was our first introduction to the ' Tale of Troy divine '; and we do not deceive ourselves in saying, that this memorable experience drew from us the first unselfish tears that ever we shed; and by the stings of grief which it left behind, demonstrated its own natural pathos." (De Quincey, Homer and the Homeridce.) SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS As the Iliad is one of the world's great masterpieces, it is a book to live with, not to read once and have done with. It is a source of perpetual profit, inspiration, and delight. It discloses at the fiftieth reading beauties that were unseen at the first acquaintance. In Homer, as Frederic Harrison says, "alone of the poets, a national life is transfigured, wholly beautiful, complete, and happy; where care, doubt, decay, are as yet unborn. Here is a secularEden of the natural man — man not yet fallen or ashamed. . . . And yet how seldom do we find a friend spellbound over the Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow, through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which will listen to Pinafore for three hundred nights, and will read M. Zola's seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer...« less