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114 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Who far from land essaying bold to range
With anxious heart their toilsome vigils keep;
Their eyes are fixed on heaven's starry steep;
The ravening billows hunger for their lives ;
And oft each shivering wretch, constrained to weep,
With suppliant
hands to move heaven's pity strives,
While many a direful qualm his very vitals rives."
All must see that there is more of ornament than of terror
in the description. Now let us turn to Homer. One passage
will suffice to show the contrast.
" On them he leaped, as leaps a raging wave,
Child of the winds, under the darkening clouds,
On a swift ship, and buries her in foam
;
Then cracks the sail beneath the roaring blast,
And quakes the breathless seamen's shuddering heart
In terror dire: death lours on every wave." *
Aratus has tried to give
a new turn to this last thought
as it shields
" But one frail timber shields them from their doom," f
banishing by this feeble piece of subtlety all the terror from
his description; setting limits, moreover, to the peril described
by saying " shields them" ;
for so long
them it matters not whether the " timber " be " frail " or
stout.
But Homer does not set any fixed limit to the danger,
but gives us a vivid picture of men a thousand times on the
brink of destruction, every wave threatening them with
instant death. Moreover, by his bold and forcible combination
of prepositions of opposite meaning he tortures his
language to imitate the agony of the scene, the constraint
which is
put on the words accurately reflecting the anxiety
of the sailors' minds, and the diction being stamped,
as it
were, with the peculiar terror of the situation. Similarly
Archilochus in his description of the shipwreck, and simi-
* //. xv. 624. f Phenomena, 299.