nts, or, at least, those which grow in flat and
well-irrigated land, or beside streams: when Scamander, for instance,
is restrained by Vulcan, Homer says, very sorrowfully, that "all his
lotus, and reeds, and rushes were burnt";[101] and thus Ulysses, after
being shipwrecked and nearly drowned, and beaten about the sea for
many days and nights, on raft and mast, at last getting ashore at the
mouth of a large river, casts himself down first upon its _rushes_,
and then, in thankfulness, kisses the "corn-giving land," as most
opposed, in his heart, to the fruitless and devouring sea.[102]

In this same passage, also, we find some peculiar expressions of the
delight which the Greeks had in trees; for, when Ulysses first comes
in sight of land, which gladdens him "as the reviving of a father from
his sickness gladdens his children," it is not merely the sight of the
land itself which gives him such pleasure, but of the "land and
_wood_." Homer never throws away any words, at least in such a place
as this; and what in another poet would have been merely the filling
up of the deficient line with an otherwise useless word, is in him the
expression of the general Greek sense, that land of any kind was in no
wise grateful or acceptable till there was _wood_ upon it (or corn;
but the corn, in the flats, could not be seen so far as the black
masses of forest on the hill sides), and that, as in being rushy and
corn-giving, the low land, so in being woody, the high land was most
grateful to the mind of the man who for days and nights had been
wearied on the engulphing sea. And this general idea of wood and corn,
as the types of the fatness of the whole earth, is beautifully marked
in another place of the _Odyssey_,[103] where the sailors in a desert
island, having no flour of corn to offer as a meat offering with their
sacrifices, take the leaves of the trees, and scatter them over the
burnt offering instead.

But still, every expression of the pleasure which Ulysses has in this
landing and resting, contains uninterruptedly the reference to the
utility and sensible pleasantness of all things, not to their beauty.
After his first grateful kiss given to the corn-growing land, he
considers immediately how he is to pass the night; for some minutes
hesitating whether it will be best to expose himself to the misty
chill from the river, or run the risk of wild beasts in the wood. He
decides for the wood, and finds in it a bower formed by a