intent of its author. The Odyssey is a moral and political
work, instructive to all degrees of men and filled with
images, examples, and precepts of civil and domestic
life.... The Odyssey is the reverse of the Iliad in moral,
subject, manner, and style, to which it has no sort of
relation but as the story happens to follow in order of
time and as some of the same persons are actors in it. Yet
from this incidental connection many have been misled to
regard it as a continuation or second part, and thence to
expect a parity of character inconsistent with its nature.
The Odyssey is a perpetual source of poetry; the
stream is not the less full for being gentle, though it is
true (when we speak only with regard to the sublime) that
a river foaming and thundering in cataracts from rocks and
precipices is what more strikes, amazes, and fills the mind
than the same body of water flowing afterwards through
peaceful vales and agreeable scenes of pasturage.
The Odyssey (as I have before said) ought to be
considered according to its own nature and design, not
with an eye to the Iliad. To censure Homer because it is
unlike what it was never meant to resemble is as if a
gardener who had purposely cultivated two beautiful trees
of contrary natures, as a specimen of his skill in the several
kinds, should be blamed for not bringing them into pairs;
when in root, stem, leaf, and flower each was so entirely
different that one must have been spoiled in the
endeavour to match the other.
From the nature of the poem, we shall form an idea of
the style. The diction is to follow the images and to take its
colour from the complexion of the thoughts. Accordingly,
the Odyssey is not always clothed in the majesty of verse
proper to tragedy, but sometimes descends into the
plainer narrative, and sometimes even to that familiar
dialogue essential to comedy. However, where it cannot
support a sublimity, it always preserves a dignity or at
least a propriety.
There is a real beauty in an easy, pure, perspicuous
[278–9]