“They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war
   Sat all the night; and many fires burned for them. 
   As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
   Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;
   And all the heights, and the extreme summits,
   And the wooded sides of the mountains appear; and from the
        heavens an Infinite ether is diffused,
   And all the stars are seen, and the shepherd rejoices in his heart;
   So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
   Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium. 
   A thousand fires burned on the plain, and by each
   Sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire;
   And horses eating white barley and corn,
   Standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned Aurora.”

The “white-armed goddess Juno,” sent by the Father of gods and men for Iris and Apollo,

   “Went down the Idaean mountains to far Olympus,
   As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
   Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,
   There was I, and there, and remembers many things;
   So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
   And came to high Olympus.”

His scenery is always true, and not invented.  He does not leap in imagination from Asia to Greece, through mid air,

   epei_e` ma’la polla` metaxy’
    Ourea’ te skioe’nta, thala’ssa te _ech_e’essa.

        for there are very many
   Shady mountains and resounding seas between.

If his messengers repair but to the tent of Achilles, we do not wonder how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of the resounding sea.  Nestor’s account of the march of the Pylians against the Epeians is extremely lifelike:—­

   “Then rose up to them sweet-worded Nestor, the shrill orator
       of the Pylians,
   And words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.”

This time, however, he addresses Patroclus alone:  “A certain river, Minyas by name, leaps seaward near to Arene, where we Pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot.  Thence with all haste we sped us on the morrow ere ’t was noonday, accoutred for the fight, even to Alpheus’s sacred source,” &c.  We fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the Minyas discharging its waters into the main the livelong night, and the hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore,—­until at length we are cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of Alpheus.

There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor.  No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind.  The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived.  But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day.  The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.