I might go on to quote the description of Calypso’s cave, and many another landscape with which this Greek romance abounds. Indeed, it would take a summer day to exhaust the passages descriptive of Nature in the Odyssey and the Iliad alone, before we could arrive at an adequate idea of the Homeric view of Nature. This only I will say and pass on—that in the Odyssey you do find that the scenes most lovingly depicted are home scenes of order, comfort, and repose. But this is not because, as Mr. Ruskin says, the Greek mind abhorred the wildness of nature, but because, with such a character to describe as Ulysses, battered by the strokes of doom, travel-weary and home-sick, the natural framework to such a human figure, that which gives at once contrast and relief, is a setting taken from the reposeful side of Nature. Of storm and trouble you have had enough in the human character. Nature here must furnish the background of repose. But in the Iliad, if we look at the similes, we find them taken from every form and aspect of Nature—the wild and vast as well as the homely and the minute. The poet gathers images from every element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though unconscious love. CHAPTER X. NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL.