denly, and we determined to

perly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek-an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in und

shireman h

wledge with much more tact than is us

collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this, to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it

f this temporal world, I read and read the Iliad. Even outwardly, it was not like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer compiling the opi

rofanely he exults over the powers divine when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all, how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough

d their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and patch

but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, whi

through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather overhead, no sound of rural labour, no sign of life in the land; but a

parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channe

h belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One's mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for

north, since the day that "divine Scamander" (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ili

n beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beac

αμου? δ' ετ

προσθεν ιεν κ

ne days' flood, and perhaps the god, when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient

back to gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was not quite suddenly indeed, but rather, as it were, in the swelling and falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that eternal coast-line, that fixed horizon, those

thley and I had pored over the map together. We agreed that whatever may have been the exact site of Troy

δοιο και Ιμβρο

of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have seen all mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom, I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse from all haziness and overreaching, would have meant to give the god for his station some spot wit

but could not, like Homer, convey the whole truth. Thus vain and false

nd the material world and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay; now then, I believ

iti and Pergamo we reached Smyrna. The letters which M