should look
like ivory stained with purple;[86] and having always around them, in
the motion and majesty of this beauty, enough for the full employment
of their imagination, they shrank with dread or hatred from all the
ruggedness of lower nature,--from the wrinkled forest bark, the jagged
hill-crest, and irregular, inorganic storm of sky; looking to these
for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such
portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and
health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler
beauty.

Thus, as far as I recollect, without a single exception, 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."[87]
This landscape consists of a cave covered with a running vine, all
blooming into grapes, and surrounded by a grove of alder, poplar, and
sweet-smelling cypress. Four fountains of white (foaming) water,
springing _in succession_ (mark the orderliness), and close to one
another, flow away in different directions, through a meadow full of
violets and parsley (parsley, to mark its moisture, being elsewhere
called "marsh-nourished," and associated with the lotus[88]); the air
is perfumed not only by these violets, and by the sweet cypress, but
by Calypso's fire of finely chopped cedar-wood, which sends a smoke,
as of incense, through the island; Calypso herself is singing; and
finally, upon the trees are resting, or roosting, owls, hawks, and
"long-tongued sea-crows." Whether these last are considered as a part
of the ideal landscape, as marine singing birds, I know not; but the
approval of Mercury appears to be elicited chiefly by the fountains
and violet meadow.

Now the notable things in this description are, first, the evident
subservience of the whole landscape to human comfort, to the foot, the
taste, or the smell; and, secondly, that throughout the passage there
is not a single figurative word expressive of the things being in any
wise other than plain grass, fruit, or flower. I have used the term
"spring" of the fountains, because, without doubt, Homer means that
they sprang forth brightly, having their source at the foot of the
rocks (a