I passed the first watch in the hammock-nettings to-night, enjoying inexpressibly the phenomena of this brilliant climate. The stars seem burning like lamps in the absolute clearness of the atmosphere. Meteors shoot constantly with a slow liquid course over the sky. The air comes off from the land laden with the breath of the wild thyme, and the water around the ship is another deep blue heaven, motionless with its studded constellations. The frigate seems suspended between them.
We have little idea, while conning an irksome school-task, how strongly the “unwilling lore” is rooting itself in the imagination. The frigate lies perhaps a half mile from the most interesting scenes of the Odyssey. I have been recalling from the long neglected stores of memory, the beautiful descriptions of the court of King Alcinous, and of the meeting of his matchless daughter with Ulysses. The whole web of the poet’s fable has gradually unwound, and the lamps ashore, and the outline of the hills, in the deceiving dimness of night, have entered into the delusion with the facility of a dream. Every scene in Homer may be traced to this day, the blind old poet’s topography was so admirable. It was over the point of land sloping down to the right, that the Princess Nausicaa went with her handmaids to wash her bridal robes in the running streams. The description still guides the traveller to the spot where the damsels of the royal maid spread the linen on the grass, and commenced the sports that waked Ulysses from his slumbers in the bed of leaves.
Ashore with one of the officers this morning, amusing ourselves with trying on dresses in a Greek tailor’s shop. It quite puts one out of conceit with these miserable European fashions. The easy and flowing juktanilla, the unembarrassed leggings, the open sleeve of the collarless jacket leaving the throat exposed, and the handsome close-binding girdle from it, seems to me the very dress dictated by reason and nature. The richest suit in the shop, a superb red velvet, wrought with gold, was priced at one hundred and forty dollars. The more sober colours were much cheaper. A dress lasts several years.
We made our farewell visits to the officers of the English regiments, who had overwhelmed us with hospitality during our stay, and went on board to get under way with the noon breeze. We were accompanied to the ship, not as the hero of Homer, when he left the same port, by three damsels of the royal train, bearing, “one a tunic, another a rich casket, and a third bread and wine” for his voyage, but by Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Wilson, soldiers’ wives, and washerwomen, with baskets of hurriedly-dried linen, pinned, every bundle, with a neat bill in shillings and halfpence.