III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 103

degradation of their impressiveness, as in the paltry fables of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from Æolus, and of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil.* Of course, you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, Æschylus, Aristophanes, and Virgil.¹ Homer, though in the epithets he applies to landscape always thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet² for rocks, seas, and trees, from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest interest in anything of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers, the absence of sensation on these subjects is singularly painful. For instance, in that, to my mind, most disgusting of all so-called poems, the Journey to Brundusium,³ you remember that Horace takes exactly as much interest in the scenery he is passing through as Sancho Panza would have done.

* Of course I do not mean by calling these fables “paltry,” to dispute their neatness, ingenuity, or moral depth; but only their want of apprehension of the extent and awfulness of the phenomena introduced. So also, in denying Homer’s interest in nature, I do not mean to deny his accuracy of observation, or his power of seizing on the main points of landscape, but I deny the power of landscape over his heart, unless when closely associated with, and altogether subordinate to, some human interest.⁴

¹ [In Plato, however, Ruskin afterwards noted, the affection for the country is confined to its softer aspects (Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiii. § 27). For the more modern feeling towards landscape shown in Æschylus and Aristophanes generally, see the same place; for Aristophanes more particularly, see also Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 26 n.), vol. iii. ch. xv. § 21, ch. xvi. § 3, vol. v. pt. vii. ch. iv. § 10. To Virgil-“landscape lover, lord of language”-the references in Ruskin’s earlier books are few, and do not indicate that same detailed study that he gave to many other classical authors (for other passing allusions to his landscape, see Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xvi. § 27, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. x. § 22); at a later time Ruskin gave much study to Virgil, and especially to the Georgics, which were to be one of the standard books in “St. George’s Schools”: see Fors Clavigera, Letters 5, 8, 18, 61, 84; and for a reference to Virgilian similes-“many thoughts in one,” see Love’s Meinie, § 44.]

² [See Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiii. § 2, for a fuller discussion of Homeric epithets; the summary statement here is not to be taken too literally, for (as Ruskin there points out) Homer has several epithets for the sea; so also for rocks, and also for trees.]

³ [A paraphrase by Ruskin of a few lines of the “Iter ad Brundusium“ will be found in Vol. II. p. 79; where his appreciation of Horace is also noted.]

⁴ [The references are to the Odyssey, x. 19, 20; and, for the Cyclops, to Virgil, G. iv. 170; Aen. viii. 424. Ruskin has some remarks on the ingenuity and deep meaning of the myth of Æolus in Queen of the Air, § 19.]

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