It Is True I See Now, On Looking To The
Passage, That Neptune, When The Work Of Destruction Was Done,
Turned Back The Rivers To Their Ancient Ways:
" . . . [Greek verse],"
But their old channels passing through that light pervious soil
would have been lost in the nine days' flood, and perhaps the god,
when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may
have done his work but ill: it is easier, they say, to destroy
than it is to restore.
We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very
plain between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a
line at some distance from the shore. Whether it was that the lay
of the ground hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all
intent upon Ida, or whether my mind was in vacancy, or whether, as
is most like, I had strayed from the Dardan plains all back to
gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was not
quite suddenly indeed, but rather, as it were, in the swelling and
falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view,
which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded to
me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that
eternal coast-line, that fixed horizon, those island rocks, must
have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian warriors by
the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege!
conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches
with which a whole army of imagining men must have told their
weariness, and how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that
daily, daily scene with their deep Ionian curses!
And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful
surprise. Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had
pored over the map together. We agreed that whatever may have been
the exact site of Troy, the Grecian camp must have been nearly
opposite to the space betwixt the islands of Imbros and Tenedos,
"[Greek verse],"
but Methley reminded me of a passage in the Iliad in which Neptune
is represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from
above the island of Samothrace. Now Samothrace, according to the
map, appeared to be not only out of all seeing distance from the
Troad, but to be entirely shut out from it by the intervening
Imbros, which is a larger island, stretching its length right
athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously
allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have seen all
mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom, I
still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see
the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse
from all haziness and overreaching, would have MEANT to give the
god for his station some spot within reach of men's eyes from the
plains of Troy.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 24 of 170
Words from 12478 to 12993
of 89094