In a poem new or old we should not expect to find abundant Nature where the theme rather forbids than invites it. Homer's theme demands action, ceaseless, furious action, the terrible energy of battle. Rapt communion with Nature is impossible; and it is there that the secret influence of Nature takes hold on man, impelling him to make her melodies. The Hebrew shepherd and singer of songs that gush from the musing heart, dwelling long with the storms and silences, had leisure to meditate and dream in the light of day and under the stars. Not so the old Greek, who, in the Iliad, glances along the sentried camps and the ranks of battle.

Besides the attitude toward Nature, enforced by the character of the composition, there remains to be taken into account the attitude toward art, the method of expression. The reserve, the definiteness, the complete utterance of the dominating idea, and the determination to advance no whit beyond the idea, the avoidance of vagueness, the shunning of suggestion, characteristic of the Greek race at the height of its development-this tendency was operative in the time of Homer. It is the rapid growth of it, begun long before his day, that developed into the race genius of the Hellenes; which, abolishing the extraneous, retaining simply the thought in hand, brought song to the terms of sculpture, held literary expression to the model of the human body. When the Greeks came, as artists, to present the intellectual and the spiritual life, it was after the fashion of a statue; the presentation must be naked, self-sufficient, finished, of faultless mold, solid,

polished, perfect.

The looker-on,

enabled to see all around the thought, rests content with the circuit of it, satisfied with what he sees; indeed, the symmetric and graceful shape would become unsightly were the imagination to run abroad, given over to what the ancient Greek would term the lawless wandering of modern art. Modern poets are often more impressive through what they hint On the conthan what they say. trary, what the Greek says is all that he wishes to have in the listener's thought.

With this key to the Greek method of art expression, we shall never look for the abandon, for the rich suggestion, the gracious, quickening vagueness, which, in modern song, hovers over the theme, holds the thought to it, yet sends it off on a thousand sympathetic ways of dream and delight. We shall never look for the diffusive power of music, which modern song has in a measure appropriated and made its own,-the sweet generating indefiniteness that wafts us we know not whither. The Greek would, at the highest hour of his culture, have been tormented by the elusiveness of the supreme modern art, that of music. Though a lover of sound, the sound must, by means of words or other fastening, attach to itself a definite meaning, or he would have none of it. The Greek could have no conception of music as we know it; his instinct and his genius ran to the art which, of all arts, holds the imagination to a central point, rivets the interest there, excluding whatever does not go to the perfection of the statuesque expression, sprung, like Athene, from the head of Zeus, and posed full before

the eye, flawless, whole, sufficient in itself and supreme.

If then we fail to discover in Homer and in the poets of the Periclean age constant and over feeling for Nature, we are to argue, not that the poet was deficient in this feeling, but that his theme, his purpose, his conception of the narrative art, prescribed bounds to which he faithfully conformed. It is not so much because Homer is a Greek or because the Iliad is so old, as it is because of the writer's alien theme and purpose, and of his method of expression, that we get comparatively few references to Nature. Yet scant as the Nature in Homer seems, at first glance, a little attention convinces one that the skies and wood-crowned hills, the cool vigorous air, the bracing winds, the general landscape and the beasts and birds of northern Greece, find their way forward for a distinct, if brief, appearance in the pauses of battle. So, in the Odyssey, the later poem and the lovelier, the gentle, temperate regions are dotted with happy Nature-pictures; especially such as belong to journeyings over quiet seas, with occasional rests on peaceful and sometimes enchanted shores. If the sea predominates in the Odyssey, forests and mountains and valleys are the ruling natural features of the Iliad.

And as when from the high crest of a great hill Zeus, the gatherer of the light ning, hath stirred a dense cloud, and forth shine all the peaks, and sharp promontories, and glades, and from heaven the infinite air breaks open

the strokes are few, but the stupendous picture is there. "Homer," says Professor Sellar, "among all the poets of antiquity, presents the most vivid and true description of the outward

world." In the Iliad, Nature, like man, bestirs herself to mighty deeds. After the pattern of the mountain trees are modelled the human warriors striving on the plain below. Polypoites and Leonteus

stood in front of the lofty gates, like highcrested oak trees in the hills, that forever abide the wind and rain, firm fixed with roots great and long; even so these twain, trusting to the mightiness of their hands, abode the coming of great Asios, and fled not.

Imbrios, struck down by the son of Telemond, falls

like an ash that on the crest of a far-seen hill is smitten with the ax of bronze, and brings its delicate foliage to the ground. Here is one of the Homeric instances of nice detail: the leaves of the ash are "delicate." Homer notices the differences in the foliage of the trees; notices, too, peculiarities occasioned by the place of growth. He is not blind to the advantages of the tree that stands alone, its roots plentifully supplied with water:

As when a man reareth some lusty sapling of an olive in a clear space where water springeth plenteously, a goodly shoot fair-growing; and blasts of all winds shake it, yet it bursteth into white blos

som.

Fire, rushing before the wind and devouring the forest, is a favorite figure; all is motion, restless, relentless energy. But now and then comes a quiet touch, with much the accent of Palestine. Thetis, lamenting in the bright cave filled with mourning Nereids, makes the trees stand for the beauty of youth:

He shot up like a young branch, then when I had reared him like a plant in a very fruitful field, I sent him in deep

ships to Ilios to fight against the men of Troy.

The old poet does not forget the heart. Does he bring mountain and fire and sea together, over them all, in their combined strength, lies the tender influence of love:

Or as when over the sea there appeareth to sailors the brightness of a burning fire, and it burneth on high among the mountains in some lonely steading-sailors whom storm-blasts

bear unwilling over the sea, the home of fishes, afar from them they love: so from Achilles' goodly, well-dight shield the brightness thereof shot up toward heaven.

Homer, whensoever he was, whosoever he was, how manysoever he was, knew the heart of man and knew the things that appealed to it; among these things the phenomena of Nature. The character of the Iliad demands broad strokes, rapid, far-reaching, comprehensive lines of depiction. But Homer could look closely when he chose. Of the lion at bay he says more than that his strength grows with his wrath:

He draweth down all his brows to cover his eyes.

Homer, as well as the Psalmist and Dante, felt the silence before the snow:

But as flakes of snow fall thick on a winter day, when Zeus the Counsellor hath begun to snow, showing forth these arrows of his to men, and he hath lulled the winds, and he snoweth continually, till he hath covered the crests of the high hills, and the uttermost headlands, and the grassy plains, and rich tillage of men; and the snow is scattered over the havens and shores of the grey sea, and only the wave as it rolleth in keeps off the snow, but all other things are swathed

over

The very movement of this passage betrays the Nature-poet; the effect is that of the steady downfall of the snow itself.

As has been said, given the verse of a poet, and we have with it his habitat, his own or that of his muse. The scenes of the Iliad are those of Northern Greece, as those of the Æneid are scenes of Northern Italy. We are as sure, on reading their poems, that Virgil lived here and Homer there as we are that Wordsworth lived in the mountains and Cowper in the lowlands.

Homer's Nature references are elemental; more sensuous, less spiritual, than those of later poets. But they are healthful and sincere. None but a Nature-lover dwells with so fond an eye as his on horses and dogs. Swift, shining, strong-necked horses-Homer revels in them. They gallop from page to page of the Iliad, urged forward by the general tempest of passion. In this day of light-footed horses there are none to compare with the strain sired by the wind:

These when they bounded over Earth, the grain-giver, would run upon the topmost ripened ears of corn and break them not; and when they bounded over the broad backs of the sea they would run upon the crests of the breakers of the hoary brine.

On occasion, Homer goes so far as to make the horse peer of his noblest human heroes. To beauty, strength and swiftness is added the gift of speech, yea, the high accent of prophecy: "To thee thyself," replies Xanthos to Achilles, "it is appointed to be slain in fight by a god and by a man."

It is not aside from our purpose to

note, in passing, that three of the great poets were ardent admirers of the horse: the author of Job, the author of the Iliad and the author of Lear, Hamlet and The Tempest.

The old poet of Hellas is superior to him of Palestine in his treatment of the horse,-Job belongs to Arabia, and he is superior to him also in his treatment of the dog. The Hebrew looked askant on the animal that drew the war car of his enemies and on the animal numbered among the unclean beasts, fit to devour such unhallowed substance as the body of Jezebe!. The dog was esteemed in Egypt, and we find complimentary stories of him in Norse and Gælic legends and in mediæval tales; but to old Homer must we look for a portrait of the dog not found again till we come to the two warm-hearted, man-loving, Natureloving poets, Burns and Scott. Ulysses, returning from his long journey, was not recognized even by his swineherd, Eumæus;

But a dog lying near lifted his head and ears. Argos it was, the dog of hardy Odysseus, whom long ago he reared but never used. . . . Yet even now, seeing Odysseus near, he wagged his tail and dropped both ears, but toward his master he had not strength to move.

Time was when men loved to picture the bard as blind, and we are taught to accept this legendary infliction in the case of Homer: but if Homer was blind, he was not blind from birth. Many phenomena of Nature were made familiar to him before his sight was veiled, if indeed that unhappy lot was ever his. Not a few of his references to wild animals, to lions, boars and other beasts of the chase, point to the probability that he

was something of a sportsman in his lusty prime, at a period when the dangers of the chase were hardly less than those of the wars of the higher animals, the personages of his immortal song. Though Homer calls few of the trees by name, one may believe that he knew them as well as did Virgil. Regarding their inhabitants, the blessed birds, we shall learn more farther along, from the sorrowful Italian exile, wandering up and down the earth and the teeming realm of imagination. One has reason, too, to believe that Homer saw all the blue in the sky and all the green in the grass that we see to-day. The evidence against this seems to be rather against the Greek language as a competitor with English in expressing differentiated color. The defect is in the terms instead of in the color sense. We know that sky-blue pigments have come to light in excavations made at Memphis and at Thebes; and "there is," as a recent investigator observes, "no proof that in mankind the color-sense has improved either in historic or pre-historic times."

THE ODYSSEY.

While the theme of the Odyssey is man, the fortunes of the human heart, the gentle art of it runs over into the inseparable realm of Nature; indeed, there is more Nature in the Odyssey than in the Iliad. Unquestionably beauty was the supreme thought of Greece in the days of the great sculptors and dramatists. The aim of every man was then to fit himself in the arch of beauty which, extended, became the supernal circle of symmetry and grace; but it will hardly do to say, with Ruskin, that man, in

the Homeric days, "shrank with dread or hatred from all the ruggedness of old Nature, from the wrinkled forest bark, the jagged hill-crest, and irregular, inorganic storm of sky." Certainly Homer did not shrink from these things; on the contrary, he frequently employs, with fierce joy, the severity of the hills and the storm of the heavens to heighten the wild charm of the battles waged by the warriors set forth for the walls of Troy.

Ruskin goes on to say that, to the best of his recollection,

every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove. This ideal is very interestingly marked, as intended for a perfect one in the fifth Book of the Odyssey; when Mercury himself stops for a moment, though on a message, to look at a landscape "which even an immortal might be gladdened to behold."

However characteristic the scene in question may be of the Odyssey, it is not so of the Iliad; besides, we must remember that Homer was an artist and wished, on the present occasion, to group allied beauties of Nature in a comprehensive picture. He therefore masses the fair features that Nature commonly brings together, as Wordsworth does, 3,000 years afterward, in the very language used by Ruskin: There was a time when meadow, grove and stream.

If we should infer that this scene hugs the ideal so closely as to practically limit Homer's Nature to the confines of it, the inference is not warranted. We have already discovered the evidence for dissent in our brief survey of the Iliad. A characteristic picture of the Iliad, "intended to be beautiful," would be rather that scene familiar to all the poets since Homer,

so admired that many a one must translate it anew for himself:

Even as when in heaven the stars about the bright moon shine clear to see, when the air is windless, and all the peaks appear and the tall headlands and glades, and from heaven breaketh open the infinite air, and all stars are seen, and the shepherd's heart is glad; even in like multitude between the ships and the streams of Xanthos appeared the watchfires that the Trojans kindled in front of Ilios. A thousand fires burned in the plain and by the side of each sate fifty in the gleam of blazing fire. And the horses champed white barley and spelt, and standing by their chariots waited for the throned Dawn.

Neither is the lovely dwelling-place of the fair-haired nymph more beautiful because set against the barren sea, quite so bounden to the gardener as Ruskin makes it appear. The fact that Mercury stops to admire the landscape before entering the grotto seems not so much proof that even the gods must approve Homer's notion of an ideal homestead as that, besides the Nature subservient to utility, there was enough free and unsubdued to delight the eyes of the flying god:

On every side soft meadows of violet and parsley bloomed. Here, therefore, even an immortal who should come might gaze at what he saw, and in his heart be glad. Here stood and gazed the guide, the Speedy-Comer. Then after he had gazed to his heart's fill on all, straightway he entered the wide-mouthed grotto.

While Homer could say with Keats, Straight mine eye hath caught new pleas

ures

Whilst the landscape round it lay,

he did not dwell upon these pleasures after the method of our great epic poet, that must stand for us moderns, did not dwell upon them till the brood