As with a radiant frontlet, bind the skies.” And he contrived also that the garden of Alcinous should preserve the likeness of Paradise, and through this likeness he represented it as ever-blooming and full of all fruits. For thus he wrote:805— “Tall thriving trees confess’d the fruitful mould; The reddening apple ripens here to gold. Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows, With deeper red the full pomegranate glows; The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, And verdant olives flourish round the year. The balmy spirit of the western gale Eternal breathes on fruits, untaught to fail; Each dropping pear a following pear supplies, On apples apples, figs on figs arise. The same mild season gives the blooms to blow, The buds to harden, and the fruits to grow. Here order’d vines in equal ranks appear, With all th’ united labours of the year. Some to unload the fertile branches run, Some dry the blackening clusters in the sun, Others to tread the liquid harvest join. The groaning presses foam with floods of wine. Here are the vines in early flower descry’d Here grapes discoloured on the sunny side, And there in autumn’s richest purple dy’d.” Do not these words present a manifest and clear imitation of what the first prophet Moses said about Paradise? And if any one wish to know something of the building of the tower by which the men of that day fancied they would obtain access to heaven, he will find a sufficiently exact allegorical imitation of this in what the poet has ascribed to Otus and Ephialtes. For of them he wrote thus:806— “Proud of their strength, and more than mortal size, The gods they challenge, and affect the skies. 805 Odyssey, vii. 114 (Pope’s translation, line 146.). 806 Odyssey, xi. 312 (Pope’s translation, line 385). 762 Chapter XXVIII.—Homer’s obligations to the sacred writers.