teristially summed, finally, by Pallas herself; when, meeting
Ulysses, who after his long wandering does not recognize his own
country, and meaning to describe it as politely and soothingly as
possible, she says:[108]--"This Ithaca of ours is, indeed, a rough
country enough, and not good for driving in; but, still, things might
be worse: it has plenty of corn, and good wine, and _always rain_,
and soft nourishing dew; and it has good feeding for goats and oxen,
and all manner of wood, and springs fit to drink at all the year
round."

We shall see presently how the blundering, pseudo-picturesque,
pseudo-classical minds of Claude and the Renaissance landscape-painters,
wholly missing Homer's practical common sense, and equally incapable
of feeling the quiet natural grace and sweetness of his asphodel
meadows, tender aspen poplars, or running vines,--fastened on his
_ports_ and _caves_, as the only available features of his scenery;
and appointed the type of "classical landscape" thenceforward to
consist in a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a hole through
it.[109]

It may indeed be thought that I am assuming too hastily that this was
the general view of the Greeks respecting landscape, because it was
Homer's. But I believe the true mind of a nation, at any period, is
always best ascertainable by examining that of its greatest men; and
that simpler and truer results will be attainable for us by simply
comparing Homer, Dante, and Walter Scott, than by attempting (what my
limits must have rendered absurdly inadequate, and in which, also,
both my time and knowledge must have failed me) an analysis of the
landscape in the range of contemporary literature. All that I can do,
is to state the general impression, which has been made upon me by my
desultory reading, and to mark accurately the grounds for this
impression in the works of the greatest men. Now it is quite true that
in others of the Greeks, especially in AEschylus and Aristophanes,
there is infinitely more of modern feeling, of pathetic fallacy, love
of picturesque or beautiful form, and other such elements, than there
is in Homer; but then these appear to me just the parts of them which
were not Greek, the elements of their minds by which (as one division
of the human race always must be with subsequent ones) they are
connected with the mediaevals and moderns. And without doubt, in his
influence over future mankind, Homer is eminently the Greek of Greeks:
if I w