It is good to remember those days spent amid traditions which three thousand years have not sufficed to strip of their glamour. If the plain still seemed to ring with the clash of arms, the slopes and wooded dells of “many fountained” Ida were so lovely, so full of poetry, that I half expected to see them peopled by lovely goddesses and shy dryads, hiding among the oaks and chestnuts and pines. But alas! Aphrodite, the Queen of Smiles (was she not born in the foam of the countless smiles of the sea?), has long since forsaken the haunts that she loved when the world was young—maybe the men of to-day are not so attractive as Anchises and Adonis, or as the lovely boy who drew down the chaste Artemis from her crescent in high heaven to steal a kiss on earth. The goddesses remain sedate and unkissing among the clouds of Olympus, and no longer condescend to entrance the solitudes of shepherds, nor plead for the palm of beauty before a mortal judge. But if the goddesses have fled for ever, the sacred groves which they loved still remain full of the magic of their beauty and of the olden time. It is only we who are unworthy to receive the divine afflatus—we degenerate—of the earth, earthy. That Homer was himself and not a limited liability company of ballad-mongers—that he, too, wandered where we did—is proved by his accurate picture of the landscape of the Troad. Kinglake brings forward the relative positions of Imbros and Samothrace. Poseidon viewed the war from Samothrace, but on the map Imbros stands between it and the Asiatic shore. How was the god’s vision not masked? Then Kinglake looked, and saw that Samothrace towered high above Imbros, so that Poseidon had well chosen his watch-tower. Ida gives what I think is a still better proof that Homer saw—and described what he saw. He could not have been born blind. Climbing Mount Ida, at first we rode through an enchanted forest, broken up by glades and pastures of rarest beauty, watered by crystal rills springing from the living rock, and babbling their way down to the plain, to join Scamander, through scenes befitting the divine mysteries sung by the poets. Higher up the vegetation becomes less luxuriant and more stern, until it dwindles into mere scrub and finally ceases altogether. Then comes a stiff ascent over loose shingle, up which we had to drag our horses, slipping back a yard for every two yards gained. The stones are bare and almost polished, scarcely so much as a lichen to be seen, but when at last we painfully reached the top of Gargarus, there burst upon our view a carpet of brilliant wild flowers, marking the spot where Here lulled to sleep the mighty Zeus as he sat brooding over the help to be given to Hector and to Troy. It was a war in which the gods themselves took sides, and fought and schemed on behalf of those whom they took under their wings.