one to express the modern poet's thrill on discovering Homer. Every traveller knows the thrill of coming suddenly, on a mountain top, to an unexpected view of the sea. There are few more thrilling moments in history than the famous incident in Xenophon's Anabasis, when the ten thousand Greeks, lost and surrounded in a hostile country, struggling blindly on, harassed by attacks day after day, suddenly from a mountain top in Armenia caught the glitter of the waters of the Euxine; it meant safety and home: and from the labouring throats, caught up from rank to rank, rang out the ecstatic shout, 'Thalatta, Thalatta '-the Sea, the Sea. How could one look in the map at the mountains of Armenia and not be stirred by the memory of that moment and the thrill of that cry?

So much for the magic of a page of the atlas. But happily we are not dependent on one book. The whole literature of travel is at our command. With these books at hand we can at will recapture the thrill of primitive mystery and the excitement and exhilaration of discovery. Or we may wander at will among the beauties of nature or art. Tennyson's little poem to his friend, Edward Lear, may be remembered. Lear is better known to most of us 'Book of Nonsense' than by his books of travel. was for his book of travels in Greece that Tennyson was so grateful:- I read and felt that I was there.'

'And, trust me while I turn'd the page,
And track'd you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found

My spirits in the golden age.'

by his

But it

Or Louis Stevenson's poem of thanks from his sick chamber to his friend Horatio Brown, for his 'Life on the Lagoons,' may be recalled:

despite my frowning fate

It did my soul so recreate
That all my fancies fled away
On a Venetian holiday.'

Tennyson put his own impressions of travel into poetry. It is almost as good as revisiting Milan to read the well-known lines. First in the cathedral:

'the chanting quires,

The giant windows' blazon'd fires,

The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!'

Then the view from the roof:

'How faintly flush'd, how phantom-fair
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there

A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys,
And snowy dells in a golden air.'

It was the vision of the Alps that awakened the true genius of Shelley; their spirit passed straight into his poetry. It was with the pilgrimage of Childe Harold on a lower level that Byron became a poet. Coleridge, like Byron and Shelley, wrote poetry about Mont Blanc; and it was on a walking tour, and because Wordsworth had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, that the idea of 'The Ancient Mariner' was suggested to him-a poem which perhaps owes some of its details to Coleridge's reading in the old Bristol library of Captain Thomas James's Strange and Dangerous Voyage.'

Keats, till he was taken to Italy to die, had with his narrow means and precarious health but scanty chance to travel; but he had the heart of the traveller. 'I have many reasons,' he wrote to Reynolds, 'for going wonderways, to make my 'winter chair free from spleen, to enlarge my vision. I'll 'have leather buttons and belt and over the hills we'll go. 'If my books will help me to it, then will I take all Europe ' in turn and see the kingdoms of the earth, and the glory ' of them.' From his walking tour in Scotland, the one chance he got and made so much of, he wrote, 'You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you the real isle ' of Tenedos.' One of the passages that Keats and Cowden Clarke first read together in Chapman's translation of Homer was the shipwreck of Ulysses in the Odyssey, and Cowden Clarke records how much moved Keats was by the phrase, 'The sea had soaked his heart through.'

The Odyssey is the prelude to all this literature of travel. There rests on the poem the eternal light and freshness of the dawn.

'So gladly from the songs of modern speech

Borrowing from the Odyssey, Tennyson takes Ulysses for the very type of the passion of travel:

'I cannot rest from travel

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known;

My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths

Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.'

Homer and Herodotus are full of travellers' tales. For this ancient world almost all real travel was travel into the unknown. Primitive geography was an oasis in a wilderness of mystery. Look at a map of Homeric geography. In the middle, in the light, is the Eastern Mediterranean, and all around it twilight regions of barbarians and monsters, then the encircling ocean, and, beyond, Cimmerian darkness. Until the discoveries of Columbus and Magellan all the old maps represented the world as circular, oval, oblong, or square, with the Mediterranean in the middle and the ocean all round. The well-known map in Hereford Cathedral puts plumb in the centre the sacred City of Jerusalem. In this map you will see to the right of Jerusalem the granary of Joseph occupying a considerable share of the earth's surface. We know from the records of pilgrims that the Pyramids of Egypt were regarded as the barns in which Joseph stored his grain against the seven lean years. Remoter peoples are indicated by such inscriptions as 'Here dwell very evil men.' The whole is decorated with strange medieval flora and fauna gathered from the old bestiaries and herbals-mandragora, salamanders, hippogriffs; and round the margin are set men with horns and men with tails, men with four eyes and men with eyes below their shoulders. It is not easy to realize that our ancestors who went on the Crusades had this notion of the world's surface. As a matter of fact these monkish maps, founded not on observation, but on medieval legend, a misreading of the Bible and the reports of pilgrims more credulous than credible, do not represent the best knowledge of the time. The sailing charts in use about the same time for the guidance of sailors were a different matter altogether,

and give a wonderfully accurate delineation of the Mediterranean coast. Those charts, however, were no more familiar to the average man then than Admiralty charts are to the average man now; and for the ordinary pilgrim or crusader the world was just such a place of grotesque distortions and embellishments as is represented by the Hereford map.

Mystery is the mother of romance, and in the early world mystery began very near home. There was room within. the narrow limits of an inland sea for Siren and Cyclops and the other bewitching marvels that Ulysses encountered. But by degrees trade, colonization, and empire penetrated the shadows and banished mystery beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the bounds to the north of barbarian resistance. Tacitus's 'Germania' was an essay in political romance. When in turn the barbarians invaded the empire, the twilight descended again, and mystery was reintroduced into the Mediterranean. For the barbarians romance lay in the splendour of Constantinople and the immemorial majesty of Rome. We catch the reflection in the vision of Valhalla. It is impossible for us civilized moderns to form any real notion of the effect on the barbarians of the first sight of such a city as Constantinople adorned by Constantine with all the wealth and art of Greece and Rome. Charles Kingsley had a try in his ballad founded on the saying of Athanaric to Theodosius. When the Kaiser' of Micklegard displayed the marvels of Byzantine civilization, the old Goth, like the Queen of Sheba, with no spirit left in him, could only

We have, by the way, a vivid account by a contemporary eye-witness, the chronicler Villehardouin, of the impression made by Constantinople on the Crusaders as late as the thirteenth century:

'You may understand how they stared at Constantinople, those who had never seen it, for they could not have imagined that there could be in the whole world a city so rich, when they saw those lofty walls and rich towers wherewith it was enclosed right round, and those gorgeous palaces and towering churches so many in number that nobody could believe it who did not see

it with his own eyes: and the length and breadth of the City, which was sovereign among all the cities of the world. You may well believe that the sight made the flesh of the boldest creep, and that was no wonder, for the enterprise was the greatest undertaken by any race of men since the world was created.'

If such was the impression made on knights and squires who had known something of Norman castle and cathedral, we may imagine the feelings of the barbarians fresh from their palisaded camps and wattled homes.

Most of us think of the Crusades as wars of religion. As wars of religion they were a failure. The splendid dream of Hildebrand, Urban, and Innocent could not be realized, and the tide of Moslem conquest was not stayed. As was finely said by a great philosopher: A second time the disciples sought their Lord at the Sepulchre and a second 'time the answer was, "He is not here. He is risen." But the Crusades were a great deal more than wars of religion. They were among other things a rare opportunity of travel in the Middle Ages. The Crusades for the time absorbed and superseded the pilgrimages to Rome. The immense processions of pilgrims to Rome,' says the historian of Rome in the Middle Ages,' ceased during the Crusades. The Crusades ended, the old longing reawoke among the peoples and drew them again to the graves of the apostles.' In 1300 Pope Boniface VIII. promulgated his Bull of Jubilee, which promised remission of sins to all who should visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul during the year. The pressure towards Rome was unexampled. A spectator standing on one of the heights of the city might have seen swarms like wandering tribes approach along the ancient Roman roads from north, south, east, and west. Italians, Provençals, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Slavs, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen. They spoke in many dialects, but they all sang in the same language the litanies of the Church, and their longing dreams had but one and the same object. On beholding in the sunny distance the dark forest of towers of the Holy City, they raised the exultant shout, " Rome, Rome," like sailors, who after a tedious voyage catch a first glimpse of land. During an entire year Rome swarmed with pilgrims, and was filled with a perfect babel of tongues.' The trade in relics and images was so gigantic that the hostile Ghibellines, VOL. 228. NO. 465.

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