And craving for sweet food comes over him;
Just at that hour the Danai by sheer might
Broke through their foemen’s ranks, each shouting loud
To cheer his comrade on. First from the van
Forth-leaping, Agamemnon slew a chief,
Bienor,”
and then he presses on through the Trojan host, to slay, and slay, and slay.
III.
Akin to this, and yet distinct from it, is the way of regarding Nature through the light of the human and especially the historic events which it has witnessed, and with which some particular spots have become indelibly associated. This, which I may call the historic coloring of Nature, has been, of course, the slow accretion of the ages, and only in quite modern times is it a prominent feature in the poets. The poets of Greece and Rome, proud as they were of the deeds of their countrymen, do not seem to have visited their great battle-fields nor to have hung on the scenery that surrounded them with that romantic interest which modern poets do. Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, names of glory as they were, and often on their lips, became to the Greek imagination names for deeds, abstractions of national achievement, rather than actual localities to be visited and gazed on for their own sakes and for the memories they enshrined. It is an English, not a Greek, poet who seizes the great features of the immortal plain, and sings—
“The mountains look on Marathon,