The straits which separate Italy from Sicily were so to speak the vestibule of the fabulous world of Homer. The threefold ebb and flow, the howling of the monster Scylla, the whirlpools of Charybdis, the floating rocks--all tell us that we are quitting here the region of truth. Sicily itself, although already known under the name of _Trinacria_, was filled with marvels; here the flocks of the Sun wandered in a charming solitude under the guardianship of nymphs; here the Cyclops, with one eye only, and the anthropophagous Lestrigons scared away the traveller from a land that was otherwise fertile in corn and wine. Two historical races were placed by Homer in Sicily, namely the _Sicani_, and the _Siceli_, or _Siculi_. To the west of Sicily we find ourselves in the midst of a region of fables. The enchanted islands of Circe and Calypso, and the floating island of Eolus can no longer be found, unless we imagine them to have originated, like Graham's Island in this century, from volcanic eruptions or elevations, and to have disappeared again by the action of the sea. The Homeric map of the world terminated towards the west by two fabulous countries which have given rise to many traditions among the ancients, and to many discussions among moderns. Near to the entrance of the ocean, and not far from the sombre caverns where the dead are congregated, Ulysses found the _Cimmerians_, "an unhappy people, who, constantly surrounded by thick shadows, never enjoyed the rays of the sun, neither when it mounted the skies, nor when it descended below the earth." Still farther away, and in the ocean itself, and therefore beyond the limits of the earth, beyond the region of winds and seasons, the poet paints for us a Fortunate Land, which he calls _Elysium_, a country where tempests and winter are unknown, where a soft zephyr always blows, and where the elect of Jupiter, snatched from the common lot of mortals, enjoy a perpetual felicity.