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.

5
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.”[1]

[Footnote 1: _Il._ xv. 624.]

6
Aratus has tried to give a new turn to this last thought--

“But one frail timber shields them from their doom,”[2]--

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 as it shields 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