[102]
In this same passage, also, we find some peculiar expressions of the
delight which the Greeks had in trees; for, when Ulysses first comes
in sight of land, which gladdens him "as the reviving of a father from
his sickness gladdens his children," it is not merely the sight of the
land itself which gives him such pleasure, but of the "land and
_wood_." Homer never throws away any words, at least in such a place
as this; and what in another poet would have been merely the filling
up of the deficient line with an otherwise useless word, is in him the
expression of the general Greek sense, that land of any kind was in no
wise grateful or acceptable till there was _wood_ upon it (or corn;
but the corn, in the flats, could not be seen so far as the black
masses of forest on the hill sides), and that, as in being rushy and
corn-giving, the low land, so in being woody, the high land was most
grateful to the mind of the man who for days and nights had been
wearied on the engulphing sea. And this general idea of wood and corn,
as the types of the fatness of the whole earth, is beautifully marked
in another place of the _Odyssey_,[103] where the sailors in a desert
island, having no flour of corn to offer as a meat offering with their
sacrifices, take the leaves of the trees, and scatter them over the
burnt offering instead.
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