“While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing, For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell; But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal, In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind, And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts; Then the Danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes, Shouting to their companions from rank to rank.” When the army of the Trojans passed the night under arms, keeping watch lest the enemy should re-embark under cover of the dark, “They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them. As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind; And all the heights, and the extreme summits, And the wooded sides of the mountains appear; and from the heavens an infinite ether is diffused, And all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart; So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium. A thousand fires burned on the plain, and by each Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire; And horses eating white barley and corn, Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora.” The “white-armed goddess Juno,” sent by the Father of gods and men for Iris and Apollo, “Went down the Idæan mountains to far Olympus, As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth, Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts, There was I, and there, and remembers many things; So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air, And came to high Olympus.” His scenery is always true, and not invented. He does not leap in imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air, ἐπειὴ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξύ Ὄυρεά τε σκιοέντα, θαλάσσα τε ἠχήεσσα. for there are very many Shady mountains and resounding seas between. If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do not wonder how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of the resounding sea. Nestor’s account of the march of the Pylians against the Epeians is extremely lifelike:— “Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator of the Pylians, And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.” This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone: “A certain river, Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene, where we Pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot. Thence with all haste we sped us on the morrow ere ’t was noonday, accoutred for the fight, even to Alpheus’s sacred source,” &c. We fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the Minyas discharging its waters into the main the livelong night, and the hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore,—until at length we are cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of Alpheus.