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has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One’s mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology.

      It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its waters have edged away far towards the north, since the day that “divine Scamander” (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ilion, “with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana glorying in her arrows, and Venus the lover of smiles.”

      And now, when I was vexed at the migration of Scamander, and the total loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks in beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beach was smooth and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. 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:

      “… ποταμους δ’ ετρεφε νεεσθαι

       Καρ’ ροον ηπερ προσθεν ιεν καλλιρροον υδωρ,”

      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!

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