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There is more to be said than the mere praise of so amazing a success; the right choice of words in this example, or (to speak more accurately) the right acceptation of them—for poets do not choose—does much more than merely say that thing which such words should say. It does much more than only tell what the singer was inspired to tell. It expands, and embranches and conceives. And out of the right acceptation of words there grows a sacred and a further explanation of their meaning: they illumine not only what we are but what we might be and what we will be. And, above all, they raise echoes: they raise echoes from beyond the world.

Thus in that little bit of Homer quoted, do you not see what it means beyond its bare poetic statement? Not only did Death and Sleep take the body of Sarpedon back to Lycia, but the bodies of all of us are in such hands: for (if you will think of it closely) in what way do men recover their innocence, their childhood and the place where they were born? In what way do they pierce through time? By sleep, in dreams, and possibly, in a more final manner, by death.

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