The Iliad of Homer - Get a Free Blog

considered these as they had a greater
mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly
employed them as the verse required
either a greater smoothness or
strength. What he most affected was the
Ionic, which has a peculiar sweetness,
from its never using contractions, and
from its custom of resolving the diphthongs
into two syllables, so as to make
the words open themselves with a more
spreading and sonorous fluency. With
this he mingled the Attic contractions,
the broader Doric, and the feebler Æolic,
which often rejects its aspirate, or takes
off its accent, and completed this variety
by altering some letters with the licence
of poetry. Thus his measures, instead of
being fetters to his sense, were always in
readiness to run along with the warmth
of his rapture, and even to give a further
representation of his notions, in the correspondence
of their sounds to what they
signified. Out of all these he has derived