Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/52

36 have been the exact site of Troy, the Grecian camp must have been nearly opposite to the space betwixt the islands of Imbros and Tenedos:—

but Methley reminded me of a passage in the Iliad in which Jove is represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from above the Island of Samothrace. Now, Samothrace, according to the map, appeared to be not only out of all seeing distance from the Troad, but to be entirely shut out from it by the intervening Imbros, which is a larger island, stretching its length right athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously allowing that the eagle-eye of Jove might have seen the strife even from his own Olympus, I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse from all haziness and over-reaching, would have meant to give the Thunderer a station within the reach of men's eyes from the plains of Troy. I think that this testing of the poet's words by map and compass, may have shaken a little of my faith in the completeness of his knowledge. Well, now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros—aloft in a far-away Heaven was Samothrace, the watch-tower of Jove!

So Homer had appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey the whole truth. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ!

Nobody, whose mind had not been reduced to the most deplorably logical condition, could look upon this beautiful congruity betwixt the Iliad and the material world, and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay; now then, I believed—now I knew that Homer had passed along here—that this vision of Samothrace over-towering the nearer island was common to him and to me.

After a journey of some few days by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo, we reached Smyrna. The letters which Methley here received obliged him to return to England.