Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
Now, reader, we have had no abstruse science here, no long words, not even a microscope or a book: and yet we, as two plain sportsmen, have gone back, or been led back by fact and common sense, into the most awful and sublime depths, into an epos of the destruction and re-creation of a former world. This is but a single instance; I might give hundreds.
Sometimes I have asked myself whether the Church does not intend to suggest that the whole story falls outside the domain of history, and is to be held as the one great epos, or myth, common to all mankind; adaptable by each nation according to its own several needs; translatable, so to speak, into the facts of each individual nation, as the written word is translatable into its language, but appertaining to the realm of the imagination rather than to that of the understanding, and precious for spiritual rather than literal truths.
The epic, the lyric, the idyllic faculties, perhaps the dramatic also, seemed to be all there, and yet all sundered, scattered about in small fragmentary poems. "In Memoriam," as we think, explains the paradox. Mr. Tennyson had been employed on higher, more truly divine, and yet more truly human work than either epos or drama.
But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.
All suffering necessitates movement, and when the suffering is intense, the movement passes over into flight. Therefore it is that the epos of suffering requires not merely time for its accomplishment, but also space. Ulysses, the "much-suffering," is also the "much-wandering." Thus our Lady in the Eleusinian procession of search represents the restless search of all her children.
It exhibits the intimate blending of the German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the "Nibelungenlied," and of the "Minnegesang." This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and post-Homeric age of early Greece.
In a well-known passage of his great epos he declares that it is through sweet infusion of the older poet's own spirit that he, the younger, follows the footing of his feet, in order so the rather to meet with his meaning.
"But, on the whole, as Time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them; and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer's Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star.
It arose at a period when the Greeks, accustomed only to the calm, unimpassioned tone of the epos, had but just found a temperate expression of lively emotion in the elegy. It was a light, tripping measure, sometimes loosely constructed, or purposely halting and broken, well adapted to vituperation, unrestrained by any regard to morality and decency.
Say, rather, an Epos, and Clotha Virumque cano, to the whole world, in Macaronic verses, which he that runs may read. And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking