Alexander William Kinglake

“ A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same sense as an oil-and-color-man may be said to know something of painting, but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; he does not stop in the ninth year of the siege, to admire this or that group of words—he ban no books in his tent, but he shares in vital counsels with the "King of men," and knows the inmost souls of the impending Gods ”

“ You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole Empires from oblivion. ”

“ The writer, compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all to the human race—that it was history—poetry—revelation—that the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever. ”