"
The last was the whole of the shipwreck of Ulysses in the Fifth Book of
the "Odyssey." I think his expression of delight, during the reading of
those dozen lines, was never surpassed:--
"Then forth he came, his both knees faltering, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sunk to death.
_The sea had soaked his heart through_; all his veins
His toils had racked t' a laboring woman's pains.
Dead weary was he."
On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet of Pope's upon the same
passage:--
"From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
_And lost in lassitude, lay all the man._"
Chapman supplied us with many an after-feast; but it was in the teeming
wonderment of this, his first introduction, that, when I came down to
breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other
inclosure than his famous sonnet, "On first looking into Chapman's
Homer.
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