“The simple, the sincere delight, The habitual scene of hill and dale, The rural herds, the vernal gale, The tangled vetches’ purple bloom, The fragrance of the bean’s perfume.” II. The second method I shall mention is that of using Nature as a background or setting to human action or emotion,—just as we see Raphael and other old masters, in their pictures of a Holy Family, bring in behind the human groups a far-off mountain line, with a piece of blue sky or some streaks of sunset above it. This is the way in which Nature is very frequently used by Homer in the Iliad, and, especially, in the Odyssey. It is as a frame or setting to his pictures of human action and character. And closely allied to this is the way of illustrating the actions, the feelings, sometimes the sufferings, of men, by striking similes taken from the most obvious appearances of the outward world, or from the doing of wild creatures in Nature. This is a use of Nature in which the Iliad of Homer especially abounds, although all poets down to our own day have freely employed it. In the Iliad there is little or no description of the scenes in which the battles are fought. The features are hinted at by single epithets, such as many-fountained Ida, windy Ilion, deep-whirlpooled Scamander, and the presence of Nature you are made to feel by images fetched straight from every element,—from the clouds, the mountain-top, the woody crag, the forest, the sea darkening under the western breeze, the midnight sky with the moon and the stars shining in its depths. But there is in the Iliad no dwelling on the features of the scenes through which the heroes pass, such as you find in the Odyssey and in the Æneid. In these last, more than in the Iliad, Nature is used as the regular framework in which human actions are set. I cannot now stay to quote passages. We shall in the sequel see how large a place is filled, how much of Nature is let in upon the reader by Homer in his similes, which are almost all taken from common occurrences in Nature or from the working of man with Nature. Sometimes, however, we are made to feel the presence of Nature by other methods than that of simile. In the thick of the great battle in the 11th Book of the Iliad, just before Agamemnon breaks forth in his splendid charge, how the mind is relieved by this glance aside from the heat and hurry of the battle to the cool and quiet of this woodland scene:—