Nay he goes back further yet: where, except in Homer, should we find a tradition like that of the mares of Erichthonius, fetched from a time five generations before his subject? Their children had Boreas for their sire. Three thousand mothers ranged over the plains of the Troad, and made their lord the wealthiest of men. So light was their footstep, that if they skimmed the sea it touched the tips only of the curling foam; and if they raced over the cornfield, the ripe ears sustained their tread without one being broken[763]. [763] Il. xx. 220-9. ~_As to movement, form, and colour._~ In other places Homer describes with no less of sympathetic emotion the vivid and fiery movements of the animal. The most remarkable of all is the noble simile of the stall-kept horse, whom every reader seems to see as with proud head and flowing mane, when he feels his liberty, he scours the boundless pastures. That adaptation, or effort at adaptation, of sound to sense, which with poets in general (always excepting especially Dante and Shakespeare,) is a sign that they have applied their whole force to careful elaboration, is with Homer only a proof of a fuller and deeper flow of his sympathies: wherever we find it, we may be sure that his whole heart is in the passage. In this very simile how admirable is the transition from the fine stationary verse that describes the charger’s customary bathe, εἰωθὼς λούεσθαι ἐϋρρεῖος ποταμοῖο, to his rapid and easy bounding over the plain, when every dactyl marks a spring[764]; [764] Il. vi. 511. ῥίμφα ἑ γοῦνα φέρει μετά τ’ ἤθεα καὶ νόμον ἵππων. For this adaptation of metre to sense in connection with the movement of horses, we may take another example. To describe Agamemnon dealing destruction among the routed Trojans on foot, we have a line and a half of somewhat accelerated but by no means very rapid movement[765]; [765] Il. xi. 158. ὣς ἄρ’ ὑπ’ Ἀτρείδῃ Ἀγαμέμνονι πῖπτε κάρηνα Τρώων φευγόντων. But when he comes to the Trojan horses in their flight, we have two lines, dactylic to the utmost extent that the metre will allow, except in one half-foot; πολλοὶ δ’ ἐριαύχενες ἵπποι κείν’ ὄχεα κροτάλιζον ἀνὰ πτολέμοιο γεφύρας, ἡνιόχους ποθέοντες ἀμύμονας. Then, coming back to the dead charioteers, he visibly slackens again; οἱ δ’ ἐπὶ γαίῃ κείατο, γύπεσσιν πολὺ φίλτεροι ἢ ἀλόχοισιν. To exhibit numerically the relative distribution of times in these members of the sentence, we have these three very different proportions; In the first, 13 long syllables to 8 short. In the second, 16 long syllables to 22 short. In the third, 11 long syllables to 10 short.