grief of the warrior's wife when he leaves her and their baby son to go to
battle; and he can almost make you shout, "Hurrah for the brave champion!"
when he tells you what wonderful deeds of prowess have been done. He can
describe a shield so minutely that you could make one like it; and he can
paint a scene of feasting so perfectly that you feel as if you had been in
the very room.

How is it that Homer makes his stories seem so real? There are several
reasons, but one of the strongest is because he tells the little things
that writers often forget to put in. When he describes the welcome given
to two strangers at the house of the lost Ulysses, by Telemachus, son of
the wanderer, he begins, "When they were come within the lofty hall, he
carried the spear to a tall pillar and set it in a well-worn rack." That
one word, "well-worn," gives us the feeling that Homer is not making up a
story, but that he has really seen the rack and noticed how it looked. The
same sentence shows why it is that people do not tire of reading Homer. It
ends, "where also stood many a spear of hardy Ulysses." This reminds the
reader that in spite of the hero's long years of absence, no one has been
allowed to remove his weapons from their old place. From this one phrase,
then, we can realize how much his wife and son love him, and how they have
mourned for him. Telemachus welcomes the strangers, but we can feel how
eager he is for them to be made comfortable as soon as possible so he can
talk of his father and learn whether they have chanced to meet him in
their wanderings. Homer's poems are full of such sentences as these; and,
no matter how many times one reads them, some thought, unnoticed before,
is ever coming to light. That is why they are always fresh and new and
interesting.

There is a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he wandered about from
one place to another, singing or reciting his poems; but this is only