This, it will be seen, is very nearly Homer’s usual “ideal”; but, going into the middle of the island, Ulysses comes on a rougher and less agreeable bit, though still fulfilling certain required conditions of endurableness; a “cave shaded with laurels,"[106] which, having no poplars about it, is, however, meant to be somewhat frightful, and only fit to be inhabited by a Cyclops.  So in the country of the Laestrygons, Homer, preparing his reader gradually for something very disagreeable, represents the rocks as bare and “exposed to the sun";[107] only with some smooth and slippery roads over them, by which the trucks bring down wood from the higher hills.  Any one familiar with Swiss slopes of hills must remember how often he has descended, sometimes faster than was altogether intentional, by these same slippery woodman’s truck roads.

And thus, in general, whenever the landscape is intended to be lovely, it verges towards the ploughed lands and poplars; or, at worst, to woody rocks; but, if intended to be painful, the rocks are bare and “sharp.”  This last epithet, constantly used by Homer for mountains, does not altogether correspond, in Greek, to the English term, nor is it intended merely to characterize the sharp mountain summits; for it never would be applied simply to the edge or point of a sword, but signifies rather “harsh,” “bitter,” or “painful,” being applied habitually to fate, death, and in Odyssey xi. 333, to a halter; and, as expressive of general objectionableness and unpleasantness, to all high, dangerous, or peaked mountains, as the Maleian promontory (a much-dreaded one), the crest of Parnassus, the Tereian mountain, and a grim or untoward, though, by keeping off the force of the sea, protective, rock at the mouth of the Jardanus; as well as habitually to inaccessible or impregnable fortresses built on heights.

In all this I cannot too strongly mark the utter absence of any trace of the feeling for what we call the picturesque, and the constant dwelling of the writer’s mind on what was available, pleasant, or useful:  his ideas respecting all landscape being not uncharacteristially summed, finally, by Pallas herself; when, meeting Ulysses, who after his long wandering does not recognize his own country, and meaning to describe it as politely and soothingly as possible, she says:[108]—­“This Ithaca of ours is, indeed, a rough country enough, and not good for driving in; but, still, things might be worse:  it has plenty of corn, and good wine, and always rain, and soft nourishing dew; and it has good feeding for goats and oxen, and all manner of wood, and springs fit to drink at all the year round.”

We shall see presently how the blundering, pseudo-picturesque, pseudo-classical minds of Claude and the Renaissance landscape-painters, wholly missing Homer’s practical common sense, and equally incapable of feeling the quiet natural grace and sweetness of his asphodel meadows, tender aspen poplars, or running vines,—­fastened on his ports and caves, as the only available features of his scenery; and appointed the type of “classical landscape” thenceforward to consist in a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a hole through it.[109]