strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner. Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:

"Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them: the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."

You hear the high pride and pathos in that. To be a poet, he
says: to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing: is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate. It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner. The pride is lacking quite: the intuition for a
divinity within man. But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate: even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down. Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said: "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses." How different the note of Milton:

"Those other two, equal with me in fate,
So were I equal with them in renown--"

or: