Ulysses, pausing to contemplate this scene, is described nearly in the
same terms as Mercury pausing to contemplate the wilder meadow; and it
is interesting to observe, that, in spite of all Homer's love of
symmetry, the god's admiration is excited by the free fountains, wild
violets, and wandering vine; but the mortal's, by the vines in rows,
the leeks in beds, and the fountains in pipes.
Ulysses has, however, one touching reason for loving vines in rows.
His father had given him fifty rows for himself, when he was a boy,
with corn between them (just as it now grows in Italy). Proving his
identity afterwards to his father, whom he finds at work in his
garden, "with thick gloves on, to keep his hands from the thorns," he
reminds him of these fifty rows of vines, and of the "thirteen
pear-trees and ten apple-trees" which he had given him: and Laertes
faints upon his neck.[90]
If Ulysses had not been so much of a gardener, it might have been
received as a sign of considerable feeling for landscape beauty, that,
intending to pay the very highest possible compliment to the Princess
Nausicaa (and having, indeed, the moment before gravely asked her
whether she was a goddess or not), he says that he feels, at seeing
her, exactly as he did when he saw the young palm tree growing at
Apollo's shrine at Delos.
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