It is indeed true that the vague accounts, which had probably reached Homer of these two waters, must be supposed not to have included the indispensable element of a current. The same remark, however, will apply to whatever he may have heard of the German or Atlantic Oceans. But in dealing with these shadowy distances, his inference would be amply warranted, without the means of complete identification, if he had heard of any waters in positions agreeing with that of his ideal Ocean, capable of communicating easily with its mouth, and, above all, independent of the _Thalassa_. One word before we finally quit the subject of the enchanted River; in order to complete the chain of connection between the Persephone of Homer and the waters of the Persian gulf, in the character of a part of Ocean, at that point upon the beach, which so well balances the Elysian plain in the west. I have already endeavoured to make use of the names Perseus, Perse, and Persephone, as evidences which attach the Persians to the eastern extremity of Homer’s ideal world, and which connect the Greek race with a Persian origin. But here we have a geographical trait, which deserves further consideration. The groves of Persephone are on the shore of Ocean, in the east, and to the south of the sunrise. What is the meaning of these groves? We are compelled, by unvarying analogies of signification, to understand them as both the symbols and the sites of a certain organized worship, which was paid to Persephone. But if paid, then paid by whom? Certainly not by the nations of the dead: for the place, where these groves were, was not within the kingdom of the goddess, but it was on the shore of Ocean. Ulysses, too, was to haul up his ship there, and only then to enter into the abode of king Aidoneus. It therefore seems to follow, that the Poet meant us to understand this as a place where Persephone was habitually worshipped by a portion of the human race, which could only be his Persians or his Ethiopians. I do not say that the two were sharply severed in his mind; but here the race to which he chiefly points appears to be the Persian race[647]. [647] Od. x. 508-12. There are even etymological signs, independent of Homer, which deepen the association between the East and the Under-world. Some writers have compared the name Cimmeria with the Arabic word _kahm_, black, and _ra_, the mark of the oblique case in Persian: Mæotis with the Hebrew Maweth, meaning death: and have treated the ancient Tartarus as equivalent to the modern Tartary, and as formed by the reduplication of Tar, in Tarik, the Persic word for darkness[648]. [648] Welsford on Engl. Language, pp. 75, 76, 88. Bleek’s Persian Vocabulary, (Grammar, p. 170.) ~_Contraction of the Homeric East._~ Next let me wind up what relates to the contraction and compression of the Homeric East.