XV.

Bome of Bamer.

"Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep brow'd HOME2 ruled as his demesne."

Keats.

WE

E are now on board the fine French steamer Egyptus, dodg ing, by the cunning of steam, the isles of Greece, which rise in these blue waters on all sides. We are playing between Thermia, named from its warm springs, and Zea, with Journa, the old Roman place of banishment, ahead. It will take nice navigation to extricate us from the complexity of these islands. But it is thrilling to career amidst these homes of ancient genius. They seem to have been compensated, for the bleakness and barreness of their scenery, by the growth of men in the elder day. We shall, before long, see the isles where Homer and Sappho lived and sung, and where God appeared in rapt vision to the soul of John, the seer of Patmos, and opened to him those Revelations of Wonder, Glory, and Mystery, which form the Omega of the living word.

It is verging toward midnight. I have just been on deck. The gallant steamer is shooting past the isle of Homer-the loveliest of the Archipelego-the most fruitful and picturesque of the isles of Greece-the celebrated Scio. It is called the Paradise of the Levant; and well deserves the name for its extraordinary fertility, and beautiful foliage and scenery. This isle is under the dominion of the Ottoman, and the revenues it affords are dedicated to the support of the mother of Abd-ulMejid, the present Sultan, who lives in magnificence upon the banks of the Bosphorus. It is in strange contrast with the

other isles of Greece; which rise in rocky eminences and broken promontories from the sea. True, it suffered much in the Greek revolution. But its vineyards, its olives, its citrons and its mastic groves, then cut down, are again bespreading the island. The other isles afford but scanty homes for the goat. Man scarcely plants his foot upon the different spots we have passed to-day, but upon Scio he has revelled amidst the prodigality of Nature. The mastic is the chief object of cultivation. It is the product of the Lentisk shrub, which covers the hill slopes, and which, when cut, drops the liquid mastic. This is hardened, refined, and exported for the use of the Turkish ladies. But why speak of all this? Is not this the isle of Homer? Of all the claims to the honor of his birthplace Scio has preferred the best. Beside, she is rich in other names. Ion the tragic poet, Theocritus the sophist, and Theopompus the historian, all hailed from this isle. But why distinguish Scio amidst such a fraternity of isles, all rich in the associations of classical antiquity,

"Where grew the arts of war and peace;

Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung.

The Scian and the Teian Muse.

The hero's harp, the lover's lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse;
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west

Than your sire's islands of the blest."

Never did bard sing more truly. Our boat is full of Greeks. I have just walked amidst them-sleeping upon the deck, utterly unconscious that they are passing the native spot of him, whose song has rung the name of Greece through two thousand years, and from continent to continent. The stars look down calmly and full of sparkle from their unclouded vault. The dark isle rises majestically upward, amidst their fretted fires. The Orient, with its deep and infinite splendors, fills the mind of the gazer, as he looks upward and eastward along that star-strewn

path. Yonder, not far from the early home of Homer, is the ancient Troy, around whose walls the scenes of Epic glory took place, with deities for actors and witnesses, which the Bard has reduced into numbers as enduring as his own name. Fit vantage

ground was Scio, whence the young poet might view the scene of his own future triumphs in Poesy; fit school wherein to nurture that imagination which dared no flight it did not attain. Perhaps from that round point of rock tufted with yellow verdure, iust opposite our vessel, "he beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey, rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea." There, might have been kindled the first spark of that genius which outlives the triumphs of all Conquerors.

Thanks to thee, Old Shore! Thou who wert the parent of art, and gave that Homer to time, which time has given to our modern world! These isles while they furnished rocks and hills, bays and mountains, as the haunts of his muse; yon rocky shore which we have left behind us, while it furnished the cloud-capped Olympus towering upward amid fraternal mounts, for his heroes and gods, also cherished his minstrelsy. Athens received his Epos; her philosophers criticised it, in unity and part; her orators quoted it; her Olympic games echoed its song; her drama was moulded by it; her sculptors formed its images and her architects enshrined them in Parthenons and Theseums. Rome gave to him apotheosis, before which power bowed in wonder, love and awe. Alexandria hid his works in hieroglyphs, but at last redeemed the ancient fame of Egypt by transmitting them to us in their present form. What would painting have been without the Venus and Diana; sculpture without the Apollo and Jove; or art without the Iliad? Legislation, too, while it cherished his works, found in them the spirit of its best enactments. The literature of the world owes to them its Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Milton, Wieland, Klopstock, its Henriade and Auraucana!

We are apt to look upon Homer, only as a singer, whose songs have no practical bearing upon the world. To the philo

sophical historian, they have deeper significance. True, their first effect was the introduction of other songs, and, in time, a superior literature in Greece. But this literature proved the salvation of even Christendom. If the classics were the bulwarks around the city of God, laid by the ancients through their own history, is not Homer the strongest tower of defence upon that bulwark? The study of Platonism and of the ethics of the rival school of Aristotle, burned in the cloisters of the dark ages, when even Christian truth was almost gone out. The destruction of Byzantium scattered the Grecian literature. The key to the New Testament thus found its way into Florence under the Medici, and into Wittenberg under the elector, until Protestantism had her lion-hearted Luther, Catholicism her sarcastic Erasmus, and the world its mild Melancthon and fervent Fenelon. England had her Duns Scotus, whose scholastic learning was exhaustless, and who gathered around him thirty thousand students at Oxford, where he taught them the logic of Aristotle, with a power which drew forth the encomium, "had the genius of Aristotle been unknown, that of Scotus could have supplied his place." And it was the ethics of Aristotle, thus taught, which brightened the mind of Wyckliffe, and gave to England her first translation of the Bible, and the reformation. To this Bible and this reformation America owes her present proud position. They unlocked the prisons of power. They unloosed the disfranchised people. The individual was rescued from the congealed hierarchy. The liberties of speech; body; property and conscience were enunciated; and to Homer in the last analysis belongs a great part of the glory! Ah! if the shade of Homer could see (we trust his shade is better off than the original corpus) this steamer of ours, with its poetry of motion, parting the waves more fleetly than his most arrowy pinnace, and working more fearfully powerful than his most potent engine against the Trojan wall; if he could see this phase of a new civilization, his visions of Olympus and dreams of Divinities, would vanish before the solid workmanship of his own brother man.

What avails this pondering? Onward we move; the French flag waves in the wind; the black guns, like sleeping lions, lie about the deck; the huge pipe emits its clouds of smoke; the illuminated compass directs the silent helmsmen; the place of Homer's birth is mute and silent under the shadow of night; a mall "echo further west" than even the blest isles, remembers the blind old bard in his fugitive pencillings; and we-dart away to new scenes and other shores.