tells the disguised Odysseus,' the brown bright nightingale, sings sweet in the first season of the spring, from her place in the thick leafage of the trees; and with many a turn and thrill she pours forth her fullvoiced music bewailing her child, dear Itylus, whom on a time she slew with the sword unwitting, Itylus the son of Zethus the prince; even as her song, my troubled soul sways to and fro.'1

Intense appreciation of the sentiment of sound is here unmistakable; yet elsewhere in the Homeric poems we hear of the sharp cry of the swallow, of the screams of contending vultures, the piercing shriek of the eagle, the wild pean of the hawk, the clamorous vociferations of his terrified victims, but nothing of the tender notes of thrush, lark, or linnet, though deliciously audible throughout Greece

In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides.

Even in the island of Calypso, where delights are imaginable at will, the poplars and cypresses house only such harsh-voiced birds as owls, hawks, and cormorants-perhaps in order to leave the uncontested palm for sweet singing to the nymph herself. The power of song does not, indeed, appear to be, in Homer's view, an excellent thing in woman.' It is not included among the gifts of Athene, or even among the graces of Aphrodite. None of his noble or admirable heroines possess it. It is reserved, as part

of a baleful dower of fascination, for enchantresses who lure men to oblivion or ruin-for Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens.

The Odyssey being essentially a sea-story, the prevalence in its fauna of marine species is not surprising. Seals frequently present themselves; coots and cormorants, laughing gulls and sea-mews, dive and play amid the surges that beat upon its magic shores; ospreys call and cry; a cuttle-fish is limned to the life; Scylla has been supposed to represent a magnified and monstrous cephalopod. Dolphins are common to the Iliad and Odyssey, and frequent the Egean nowadays as of old. Their mythical associations in post-Homeric literature are, indeed, forgotten; but the direction in which they travel, collected into shoals, helps the fishermen of Syra and Melos to a rude forecast of the set of impending winds.

The only significant zoological novelty, then, in the Odyssey may be said to lie in its recognition of the goose as a domesticated bird. The prominence given by it to swine-keeping, only incidentally mentioned in the Iliad, is also noteworthy. A dissimilarity, on the other hand, in the ethical sentiment towards animals displayed in the two poems-above all, as regards the horse and dog-cannot fail to strike a dispassionate reader; but this has been sufficiently dwelt upon in a separate chapter. The Erhard, Fauna der Cycladen, p. 27.

remark need only here be added that the conception of the dog Argos seems no less thoroughly European than that of the horses of Rhesus is Asiatic. Both,

it is true, may have had a local origin on the same side of the Hellespont, but, from the point of view of moral geography, they undoubtedly belong to different continents.

CHAPTER VI.

TREES AND FLOWERS IN HOMER.

IF we can accept as tolerably complete the view of early Achæan beliefs presented to us in the Iliad and Odyssey, they included but few legendary associations with vegetable growths. The treatment of the Homeric flora, like that of the Homeric fauna, is essentially simple and direct. One magic herb has a place in it, and the enchanted stem of the lotus. bears fruit of inexplicable potency over the subtly compounded human organism; but tree-worship is as remote from the poet's thoughts as animal-worship, and flower-myths seem equally beyond his ken. He knew of no 'love-lies-bleeding' stories interpreting the passionate glow of scarlet petals; nor of 'forgetme-not stories fitted to the more tender sentiment of azure blooms; nor of delicate calyxes nurtured by goddesses' tears; nor of any other of the wistful human fancies endlessly interwined with the beautiful starry apparitions of spring-tide on the blossoming earth. The simplicity of his admiration for them

might, indeed, almost have incurred the disapprobation of ultra-Wordsworthians. With the 'yellow primrose' he never had an opportunity of making acquaintance, by the river's brim' or elsewhere; but crocuses or hyacinths, violets or poppies, drew him into no reveries; no mystical meanings clung about the images of them in his mind; he looked at them with open eyes of delight, and went his way.

The oak has been called the king of the forest, as the lion the king of beasts. But its supremacy is largely a thing of the past. To the early undivided Aryans, it was the tree of trees. Their common name for it, which survived with its original special meaning in Celtic and Greek, came, in other languages, to denote the generalised conception of a tree, showing the oak to have been pre-eminent in their common ancestral home. Traces of this shifting of the linguistic standpoint are preserved in some Homeric phrases. Thus, drûs-etymologically identical with the English tree-means, not only an oak, but, most probably, the particular kind of oak familiar to us in England-Quercus robur, the unwedgeable and gnarled oak' of Shakespeare. But the generic significance gradually infused into the specific term comes to the front in several of its compounds. A wood-cutter, for instance, is, in the Iliad, literally an 'oak-cutter,' and the solemn shade' round Circe's dwelling was afforded, etymologically, by an oaken grove, although the meaning really conveyed by the

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