VIII APOLOGIA PRO BAMBUSIS MEIS 195 
wet to the bone under torrents of rain, were separated from 
our baggage for two days, and had to take refuge in a 
Turkish farmhouse, where, during the hideous nights, we 
fed the hungry myriads that formed the subject of the 
famous riddle which drove Homer to despair and death. 
Happily, however, memory makes light of mischances, and it 
is the loveliness and delight of the days that followed which 
remain crystallised in my mind—days when we wandered 
through the Ida Range amid scenes so entrancing that one 
understood how the burning imagination of the old Greek 
poets peopled them with gods and goddesses, wood nymphs 
and water nymphs, beings more ethereal and more beautiful 
than the children of men, and yet capable of revealing 
themselves to, and even of loving, and being loved by, those 
few happy mortals to whom the supreme gift of the favour 
of Olympus should have been vouchsafed. I remember how, 
during the lower part of the ascent of Mount Ida, we rode 
through the enchanted forest and among the pastures where 
young Paris tended his flock, and Aphrodite used to console 
the solitudes of Father Anchises. (How hard it is, by the 
way, that Paris should seem always young, as young to-day 
as when he went a-courtine Helen; while Anchises, who 
charmed the Queen of all charms, is nothing but a blear- 
eyed wreck, in order to bring into relief the everlastingly 
priggish piety of pious Aneas! a strange case of poetic 
injustice!) I remember how one longed to stop and dream 
away the lovely noontide under the shade of the great trees 
—Oaks and. Chestnuts and Pines, and others whose names I 
knew not; but it was enough for me that they were the 
descendants of the very trees of Homer, as it was enough for 
