Break open to their highest; and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So, many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain: and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And, champing golden grain, the horses stood,
Hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn.
The same vision into the charmed world of the classic realism had Keats when he wrote his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” and put a whole age of ecstatic delight into these matchless lines:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told