“At a very early period of the world the Phœnicians ventured beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. They built Gades and Tartessus on the Spanish, and Lixus and several other towns on the Mauritanian coasts of the Atlantic. They sailed along those coasts northwards to the Cassiterides where they obtained tin, and to the Prussian coast from whence they brought amber; and southwards, past Madeira, to the Cape de Verde Islands. They visited, among other places, the Canaries, and were struck by the appearance of the lofty Peak of Teneriffe, enhanced by its rising immediately from the sea. Through the colonies which they sent to Greece, and especially through that which came under Cadmus to Bœotia, the notice of this mountain rising high above the region of clouds, and of the “Fortunate Islands,” adorned with fruits of every kind, and especially with the golden orange, spread into Greece. Here the tradition was propagated by the songs of the bards, and thus reached Homer. He speaks in the Odyssey (i. 52) of an “Atlas who knows all the depths of the sea, and who supports the great pillars which divide heaven and earth from each other.” He speaks, too, in the Iliad, of the Elysian fields, which he describes as a lovely land in the west. (Il. iv. 561.) Hesiod expresses himself in a similar manner respecting Atlas, who he makes a neighbour of the nymphs the daughters of Hesperus. (Theog. V. 517.) He calls the Elysian fields, which he places at the western limit of the earth, the islands of the Blest. (Op. et dies, v. 167.) Later poets have added further embellishments to these myths of Atlas, of the Hesperides, their golden apples, and the Islands of the Blest, assigned as the dwelling-place of the virtuous after death; and have combined with them the expeditions of the Tyrian god of trade, Melicertes (the Grecian Hercules).