"He from the bath, cleansed from the dust of toil,
Passed to the drinkers; and Nausicaa there
Stood, moulded by the gods exceeding fair.
She on the roof-tree pillar leaning, heard
Odysseus; turning, she beheld him near.
Deep in her breast admiring wonder stirred,
And in a low sweet voice she spake this winged word.

"Hail, stranger-guest! when fatherland and wife
Thou shalt revisit, then remember me,
Since to me first thou owest the price of life.'
And to the royal virgin answered he :
'Child of a generous sire, if willed it be
By Thunderer Zeus, who all dominion hath,
That I my home and dear return yet see,

There at thy shrine will I devote my breath,

There worship thee, dear maid, my saviour from dark death."

It is not easy to discover, with any certainty, what the Greek poet meant us to understand as to the feelings of Nausicaa towards Ulysses. It has been said that Love, in the complex modern acceptation of the term, is unknown to the Greek poets. Nor is there, in this passage, any approach to the expression of such a feeling on the part of the princess. Yet, had the scene found place in the work of a modern poet, we should have understood at once that, without any kind of reproach to the perfect maidenly delicacy of Nausicaa, it was meant to show us the dawn of a tender sentiment-nothing more-towards the stranger-guest whom the gods had endowed with such majestic graces of person, who stood so high above all rivals in feats of strength and skill, whose misfortunes surrounded him. with a double interest, and, above all, in whom she felt a kind of personal property as his deliverer

The Greek historian Plutarch chivalrously defends the young princess from the charge of forwardness, which ungallant critics brought against her as early as his day. It was no marvel, he says, that she knew and valued a hero when she saw him, and preferred him to the carpet-knights of her own country, who were good only at the dance and the banquet. But with her it was, after all, a sentiment, and no more; but which might have ripened into love, under other circumstances, had the hero of her maiden fancy been as free to choose as she was.

So vanishes from the page one of the sweetest creations of Greek fiction-the more charming to us, as coming nearest, perhaps, of all to the modern type of feeling. The farewell to Nausicaa is briefly said; and Ulysses, sitting by King Alcinous at the banquet, pays a high compliment to the blind minstrel, and gives him a new theme for song. Since he knows so well the story of the great Siege, let him now take his lyre, and sing to them of the wondrous Horse. Demodocus obeys. He sings how the Greeks, hopeless of taking Troy by force of arms, had recourse at last to stratagem how they constructed a huge framework in the shape of a horse, ostensibly an offering to the gods, and then set fire to their sea-camp, and sailed away— for home, to all appearance-leaving an armed company hidden in the womb of the wooden monster; how the Trojans, after much doubt, dragged it inside their walls, and how, in the night-time, the Greeks issued from their strange ambush, and spread fire and sword through the devoted city. And all along Ulysses

is the hero of the lay. He is the leader of the venturous band who thus carried their lives in their hands into the midst of their enemies: he it is who, "like unto Mars," storms the house of Deiphobus, who had taken Helen to wife after the death of his brother Paris, and restores the Spartan princess to her rightful lord. Tears of emotion again fill the listener's eyes; and again the courteous king bids the minstrel cease, when he sees that some chord of mournful remembrance is struck in the heart of his guest. But he now implores him, as he has good right to do, to tell them who he really is. Why does the Tale of Troy so move him? The answer, replies the stranger, will be a long tale, and sad to tell; but his very name, he proudly says, is a history—“I am Ulysses, son of Laertes !"

CHAPTER IV.

ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS.

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THE narrative, which Ulysses proceeds to relate to his host, takes back his story to the departure of the Greek fleet from Troy. First, on his homeward course, he and his comrades had landed on the coast of Thrace, and laid waste the town of the Ciconians. Instead of putting to sea again with their plunder, the crews stayed to feast on the captured beeves and the red wine. 'Wrapt in the morning mist," large bodies of the natives surprised them at this disadvantage, and they had to re-embark with considerable loss. This was the beginning of their troubles. They were rounding the southern point of Greece, when a storm bore them out far to sea, and not until sunset on the tenth day did they reach an unknown shore-the land of the Lotuseaters

"Who, on the green earth couched beside the main, Seemed ever with sweet food their lips to entertain."

To determine the geography of the place is as difficult as to ascertain the natural history of the lotus, though A. C. vol. ii.

E

critics have been very confident in doing both.* The effect of the seductive food on the companions of Ulysses is thus described :—

"And whoso tasted of their flowery meat

Cared not with tidings to return, but clave

Fast to that tribe, for ever fain to eat,

Reckless of home-return, the tender Lotus sweet."

Those who ate of it had to be dragged back by main force to their galleys, and bound fast with thongs, so loath were they to leave that shore of peaceful rest and forgetfulness. In the words of our own poet, who has founded one of the most imaginative of his poems on this incident of Ulysses' voyage, so briefly told by Homer

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"Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said- We will return no more :'
And all at once they sang-' Our island-home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.'"+

* The Greek historian Herodotus places a tribe of lotuseaters, "who live by eating nothing but the fruit of the lotus," on the coast of Africa, somewhere near Tripoli. Pliny and other ancient writers on natural history speak of this fruit as in shape like an olive, with a flavour like that of figs or dates, not only pleasant to eat fresh, but which, when dry, was made into a kind of meal. The English travellers Shaw and Park found (in the close neighbourhood of Herodotus' lotus-eaters) what they thought to be the true lotus-a shrub bearing "small farinaceous berries, of a yellow colour and delicious taste." Park says— "An army may very well have been fed with the bread I have tasted made of the meal of the fruit, as is said by Pliny to have been done in Libya." There is also a water-plant in Egypt mentioned by Herodotus under the name of lotus-probably the Nymphaea lotus of Linnæus.

Tennyson, "The Lotus-Eaters."