In this Book the reader will observe two distinct parts, which are so often found in Homer and constitute the deepest distinction in his poems: these two parts are the Upper World of the Gods and the Lower World of Man, both of which are shown in action and counteraction. The grand dualism between the mortal and the immortal is fused into a living narrative and makes the warp and woof of Homeric poesy. The general purport of both parts is seen to be the same at bottom: it is to remove the obstacles which stand in the way of the Return of Ulysses to home and country. These obstacles arise from the Gods above and from Nature below the divine and the physical, though the latter also is presided over by deities. Thus the Greek hero, with the aid of the higher Gods, is to put down the lower ones, or convert them into aids for his advancement towards the grand end, which is his institutional life in Family and State. In this way only can Ulysses, from his alienation, attain unto harmony with himself and with the Divine Order.

The first part of the Book gives the Council of the Gods and its consequences reaching down to the mortal who is the subject of deliberation. We shall note three stages in this movement from Olympus to Earth: (1) Zeus to Hermes, (2) Hermes to Calypso, (3) Calypso to Ulysses. Thus from the highest the decree is brought below and opens the providential way.

The second part deals with the mortal, who is brought into relation with three Gods, all representing phases of the physical element of water: (1) Neptune, the great deity of the sea, (2) Ino Leucothea, a lesser deity of the same, (3) the River-God, through whose channel Ulysses comes at last to land. It is manifest that he must rise beyond these water-divinities with their uncertain fluctuating element, and attain to the fixed earth with its life, ere he can find repose. We shall now develop these two parts of the Book with their subdivisions in the order stated above.

I.

First then is the divine obstacle, which has to be removed by the Gods in Homer, when the individual is ready to have it removed. This obstacle is at present centered in the Goddess Calypso, the marvelous concealer and extinguisher of the Hero in her island Ogygia. Neptune is not here spoken of, though his element, the sea, is mentioned as something which must also be met and transcended; the Hero through his own will can surmount this difficulty. Verily Calypso is the grand spiritual hindrance of Ulysses, and, to help him get rid of it, the Olympians assemble and start the movement, the conditions being that he is internally prepared to be helped by the Gods. Of the latter fact we shall note a number of indications hereafter.

Of this divine activity in removing the first obstacle we may distinguish three phases:

1. The council of the Gods on Olympus under the presidency of Zeus, and the decree there.

2. Hermes is sent by the supreme deity to Calypso, with the decree.

3. Calypso imparts the decree to Ulysses, who soon sets about doing his part.

In this brief outline we see the descent of the divine influence from Zeus the Highest, through Hermes messenger of the Gods, to Calypso, a local subordinate deity, down to the mortal Ulysses who is to get the benefit thereof. Thus the poet makes his world-order ready for the deed of the man, who is now to act with all the energy of his being, and not lie back expecting the Gods to do everything for him. Such is the situation between the divine and human sides, of which we shall elaborate the former a little more fully.

1. The council of the Gods in which the matter is now discussed, seems somewhat like a repetition of the one at the beginning of the First Book, which indeed starts the whole poem. At present we may suppose that the poet wishes to recall that first council and its decree to the mind of the reader, inasmuch as the latter is now to begin the second grand division of the poem, the Odyssey proper, or Return of Ulysses.

Pallas takes up the complaint and arraigns Providence on an ethical ground: the good king is forgotten and the good man suffers. To the face of the Supreme Ruler she draws the conclusion: “Let not any sceptered king henceforth be kind to his people and recognize justice, but always let him be harsh and work unrighteousness.” Then she cites the unhappy lot of Ulysses. But Zeus throws the charge back upon Pallas, for she already had laid the divine plan that Ulysses was to take vengeance on wrong-doing suitors, and Telemachus she could save “by her skill,” if so she chose. Here Pallas again hints as she did in the First Book, the two lines on which the poem moves (Telemachus and Ulysses), and she also notes the two present obstacles (Calypso and the sea) in the way of the Return of Ulysses.

The divine activity begins work at once: Zeus sends Hermes to Calypso with the Olympian decree. Ulysses, however, is to reach home “without any escort of the Gods or of mortal men;” that is, he must exercise his own free-will tremendously, there is to be no special intervention of the Gods without the corresponding human effort. Note this passage as indicating the consciousness of the poet respecting divine help; it is not to take the place of free agency, but to complement the same. The Hero will have to sail on a raft, “suffering evils;” but he will reach “the land of the Phaeacians, near of kin to the Gods,” where he will be “honored as a God,” and will be sent home with abounding wealth, “more than he would ever have received at Troy, returning unharmed with his share of the booty.” Such is the promise of the world-governor to the self-reliant man; this promise is not fate but foresight on the part of the Supreme God. “Thus is the Hero destined to see again his friends,” namely by means of a small raft or float, which he alone must control in his own strength, without the help of God or man. Such is the reward of heroic endeavor, proclaimed by Zeus himself.

2. The messenger Hermes begins his flight down to Calypso, holding his magic wand, with which he puts men to sleep or wakens them, imparting the power of vision or taking it away. He reaches the wonderful island with its grot, the account of which has been a master-stroke in literature, and shows that the description of nature was not alien to the Greek poet, though he rarely indulges in it. One thinks that the passage contains a suggestion of much modern writing of the kind.

It is to be noted that this island is mostly a wild product, it has had very little training from its resident. A natural house and garden we see it to be in the main; the senses, especially sight and smell, are gratified immediately by physical objects. There is little indication of Art, possibly a beginning in the singing and weaving; rude nature may have been transformed somewhat in the four fountains and in the trailing grape-vine. But this description is not made for its own sake, as are many modern descriptions of nature; the whole is the true environment for Calypso, and suggests her character.

Her name means the concealer, concealed herself in that lone sea-closed island, and concealing others. Undeveloped she is, like nature, yet beautiful; sunken still in the life of the senses, she dwells in her little paradise without any inner scission. But it must be recollected that Ulysses is not native to the island, he has come or rather fallen hither, from a higher condition. He, therefore, has the scission in himself, he longs to leave and be restored out of this realm of mere nature.

With such a longing the Gods must coincide, for they are the Gods of culture, of the rise out of the physical. The long Journey of Hermes hints the distance between Olympus and Calypso’s isle a distance which has its spiritual counterpart. The command of the Olympians is borne to this lower Goddess; Hermes is the voice of the higher ethical divinity to the lower one of mere nature. But even the higher God has his physical counterpart, is not yet wholly a spirit; so Hermes eats his ambrosia and drinks his nectar set before him by Calypso in true Greek fashion and misses the smoke of sacrifices along his barren route.

It is curious to see how Hermes plays with polytheism, hinting ever so slyly the contradiction in the Greek Pantheon. “Why dost thou a God ask me a God why I come?” It is indeed an absurd question, for a God ought to know in advance. In numerous places we can trace a subtle Homeric humor which crops out in dealing with his many deities, indicating a start toward their dissolution. Then with a strong assertion of the supremacy of one God, Zeus, Hermes utters the unwilling word: Ulysses must depart from this island.

The answer of Calypso is significant, she charges the Gods with jealousy; “Ye grudge the Goddesses openly to mate with men,” which proposition she nails by several examples. But the Gods reserve to themselves the privilege of license with mortal women. A complaint still heard, not in the Olympian but in our Lower World; men are not held to the same code of morals that women are! But Calypso yields up her lover whom she “thought to make immortal and ageless.” What else can she do? It is true that she saved him once and has preserved him till the present; she is, however, but a stage which must now be transcended. Appetite may preserve man, still he is to rise above appetite.

3. Now Ulysses is brought before us. The first fact about him is, his intense longing to return home; he is found “sitting on the shore, and his eyes were never dry of tears” as he looked out on the sea toward his country; “for the nymph was no longer pleasing to him,” whatever may have been the case once. Surely the hero is in bonds which he cannot break, though he would; a penitential strand we may well find in his sorrow; thus he is ready for release.

Calypso, therefore, announces to him the divine plan: he must make a raft and commit himself to the waters. She has to obey, for is she not really conquered by Ulysses? Certainly the divine order requires her to send the man away from her island. Yet the return is by no means made easy, but is to be won by hardest effort; he must grapple with the waves, with angry Neptune after leaving Calypso. No wonder that Ulysses shuddered at the proposition; truly he has the choice between the devil and the deep sea, and he manfully chooses the latter. First, however, the Goddess has to take the great oath “by Earth, by Heaven above and Styx below,” the sum total of the physical universe, from whose presence the perjurer cannot escape, though a God, that she is not practicing any hidden guile against her much-desired guest. Always the doubter, the skeptic Ulysses will show himself, even toward a divinity. He must test the Gods also, as well as man. Very beautiful and humane is the answer of the Goddess: “Such things I plan and deliberate for thee as I would devise for myself, were I in so great straits. For I too have a righteous mind, and the heart within my breast is not of iron, but compassionate.”

Has a change come over the Goddess through this visit from Olympus? Hardly could she have felt this before, else she would have sent away Ulysses of her own accord. Her adjustment to the divine decree seems now to be internal, and not simply a yielding to an external power. Still the separation costs her deep pangs, and she wonders how Ulysses, a mortal, can give her up, who is immortal, with all her beauty and the pleasures of her paradise.

The answer of Ulysses reveals the man in his present stale of mind. He recognizes Calypso as beautiful, deathless, ever young; still he must have something more than sensuous life and beauty; though it last forever, it can never satisfy. Not to be compared with the Goddess in grace and stature, is his wife Penelope, still he longs for his home; “yea, though some God wreck me on the wine-dark deep, I shall endure.” But there is no doubt the other side is also present in Ulysses; he has within himself a strong sensuous nature with which is the battle, and the poem does not disguise the matter, for he is again ready to enjoy all the pleasures of Calypso’s bower, after this paroxysm of home-sickness.

Such is the deep struggle of the man; such is also the divine obstacle, which has to be removed by an Olympian interference before he can return. We see that Ulysses in spite of all blandishments of the Goddess and momentary weakness of himself, was ready for its removal; in his heart he has overcome Calypso, and wishes to get back to his institutional life in Family and State. Such a man must return, the Gods must be on his side, else they are not Gods. According to the Greek conception, Calypso is a subordinate deity who must be put down by the Olympians; appetite is not a devil, but a lower good, which must be adjusted to the higher. Note, then, that the external stream, or the world-movement represented by the Gods, now unites with the internal stream, the spirit of the individual, and brings forth the great event. As stated often before, these two streams run through all Homeric poetry.

Ulysses now makes his raft; the hero is also a ship-builder, being the self-sufficient man, equal to any emergency, in whom lie all possibilities. The boat, still quite primitive, is constructed before our eyes; It is the weapon for conquering Neptune, and prophesies navigation. Calypso aids him in every way, she even supplies him with tools, the axe, the adze, the augur, which imply a more advanced state of civilization than has hitherto appeared in the Dark Island. Whence did she obtain them? No special answer is given; hence we are thrown back upon a general answer. Calypso is the original wild state of nature; but her transformation has begun, she helps Ulysses in her new character. These tools are themselves formed from nature into means for subduing nature; the instrument of bronze in the hands of the wood-cutter is the master of the tree. At present Calypso is also such an instrument; she, the wild product of nature, is herself transformed into a means for helping Ulysses conquer the mighty physical element before him; an implement she has become in the hand of the Gods for restoring the heroic endurer, and hence she can emblematically hand him these material implements, for they are one with her present spirit. Indeed we may carry the analogy one step further, turning it inwardly: Calypso, though once the inciter to sensuous desire, now helps the man put it away and flee from it; ethically she is converted into an instrument against her former self. In like manner nature is turned against nature by the thinking artificer.

Also food and drink and raiment the Island Goddess furnishes for the voyage; with rare skill she tells him how to direct his course by the stars; she is mistress over the winds, it seems, for she sends the right one to blow. Wonderful indeed is the change; all those forces of nature, formerly so hostile, have been transformed into helpers, Calypso herself being also transformed. Thus we catch the outlines of the Fairy Tale or marvelous story, which tells, in a supernatural way, of man’s mastery of the physical world, once so destructive, now so obedient.

Cloth for his sails she brought him, but we must recollect that she was a weaver at the start of the story. At last Ulysses pushes his raft down into the fair salt sea; Ogygia, the place of nature’s luxuriance and delight, is left behind; he must quit the natural state, however paradisaical, and pass to the social order, to Ithaca, though the latter be poor and rocky. Still we may well recall the fact that the island and Calypso once saved Ulysses, when wrecked elsewhere, on account of the slaughter done to the Oxen of the Sun; this wild spot furnished him natural shelter, food, gratification; nay, it gave him love.

To be sure, the other side is not to be forgotten: it had to be transcended, when it kept him away from the higher institutional life. Ulysses, the wonderful, limit-transcending spirit, unfolds within even while caught in this wild jungle; he evolves out of it, as man has evolved out of it, thus he hints the movement of his race, which has to quit a cave-life and a mere sensuous existence. Such is the decree of the Gods, for all time: the man must abandon Calypso, who is herself to be transformed into an instrument of his progress.

We may now begin to see what Calypso means, in outline at least. The difficulty of comprehending her lies in her twofold character: at one time she is nature, then she is the helper against nature. But just therein is her movement, her development. She is Goddess of this Island, where she rules; but she is a lesser deity who has to be subordinated to the Olympians, as nature must be put under spirit. The Greek deified nature, not being able to diabolize it; still he knew that it must be ruled and transmuted by mind. Thus Calypso is a Goddess, inferior, confined to one locality, but having sensuous beauty as nature has. She, without ethical content, as purely physical, stands in the way of institutions, notably the Family; she seduces the man, and holds him by his senses, by his passion, till he rise out of her sway. On this side her significance is plain: she is the female principle which stands between Ulysses and his wedded wife, she not being wedded. Thus she is an embodiment of nature, from the external landscape in which she is set, to internal impulse, to the element of sex. So it comes that she is represented as a beautiful woman, but beauty without its ethical content can no longer chain Ulysses. That charm is broken, in spite of passing relapses.

Then comes the other side of Calypso’s character, as already indicated: she changes, she turns and helps Ulysses put down herself and get away from her world, furnishing him quite all the means for his voyage. Not without a certain regret and parting display of her charms does she do this; still the change is real, and at the last stage we must imagine a Calypso transformed or partially so.

The enchantress on her magic island is a favorite theme with the Fairy Tale, and the situation in itself rouses curiosity and wonder. The bit of land floating on the sea in appearance, yet withstanding wave and tempest, is, to the sailor, the home of supernatural beings. The story of Calypso has the tinge of nautical fancy. In like manner the story of Robinson Crusoe is that of a sea-faring people. We see in it the ship-wrecked man, the lone island, the struggle with nature for food and shelter. But Defoe has no supernatural realm playing into his narrative no beautiful nymph, no Olympian Gods. That twofold Homeric conception of an Upper and Lower World, of a human and divine element in the great experience, is lost; the Englishman is practical, realistic, utilitarian even in his pious observations, which he flings into his text from the outside at given intervals.

Ogygia, the abode of Calypso, means the Dark Island, upon which Ulysses is cast after the destruction of the Oxen of the Sun. Calypso, in harmony with the name of her abode, signifies the concealer and that is what has happened to Ulysses, his light is hidden. She is the daughter of Atlas, who has two mental traits assigned to him; he is evil-minded and he knows all the depths of the sea. A demonic being endowed with his dark knowledge of things out of sight; he has a third trait also, “he upholds of himself the long pillars which keep Heaven and Earth apart” (Book . Naturally under such a burden he is not in good humor. Calypso is the daughter who, along with her grot, may be conceived to have risen out of the obscure depths of the sea, with something of her father’s disposition. Doubtless Greek sailors could behold in her image the dangerous rocks which lurked unseen beneath the waters around her island. The comparative mythologist finds in her tale the clouds obscuring or concealing the Sun (here Ulysses) till the luminary breaks out of his concealment and shines in native glory. Something of truth lies in these various views, but the fundamental meaning is not physical, but ethical.

II.

We now come to the great physical obstacle standing in the way of the Return of Ulysses, the sea, which, however, has always its divine side to the Greek mind. A series of water-deities will rise before us out of this mighty element, assuming various attitudes toward the solitary voyager. Three of them, showing themselves as hostile (Neptune), as helpful (Ino Leucothea), as saving (the River-God); all three too seem in a kind of gradation, from the vast total sea, through one of its phases, to the small stream pouring into the sea from the land. Thus the Greek imagination, playing with water, deified the various appearances thereof, specially in their relation to man. The introduction of these three marine divinities naturally organizes this second part of the Fifth Book into three phases or stages. Such is the divine side now to be witnessed.

Parallel to this runs the human side, represented by the lone hero Ulysses, who is passing through a fearful ordeal of danger with its attendant emotions of anxiety, terror, hope, despair. A very hard test is surely here applied to weak mortal flesh. We shall observe that he passes through a series of mental perturbations at each divine appearance; he runs up and down a scale of doubt, complaint, resolution. His weakness he will show, yet also his strength; dubitation yet faith; he will hesitate, yet finally act. Thus he saves himself at last through his own will, yet certainly with the help of the Gods; for both sides have to co-operate to bring about the heroic act of his deliverance.

Pallas also comes to the aid of her favorite, but in an indirect manner. The sea does not seem to be her element. She stops the winds and “informs his mind with forecast,” but she does not personally appear and speak, nor is she addressed, as is the case with the water-gods. She plays in by the way in this marine emergency; her appearances now do not organize the action. But the three appearances of the water-gods are the organic principle, their element being at present the scene of the adventure. On these lines we shall note the course of the poem in some detail.

1. Neptune returning from the Ethiopians to Hellas, sees the lone sailor with his little craft from the heights of the mountain called Solyma; at once the God’s wrath is roused and he talks to himself, “shaking his head.” The clouds, the winds, the ocean obeyed his behest, and fell upon the voyager in a furious tempest. A huge billow whirled the raft around and threw Ulysses off into the deep; with difficulty be regained his place, and escaped death.

A vivid picture of the grand obstacle to early navigation, of which Neptune is the embodiment. Why should he not be angry at the man who seeks to tame him? The raft means his ultimate subjection. Nature resists the hand which subdues her at first, and then gracefully yields. To be sure there had to be a mythical ground for Neptune’s anger at Ulysses: the latter had put out the eye of his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, which was another phase of the subjection of wild nature to intelligence. For seventeen days Ulysses had easy sailing, guided by the stars; but the sea has its destructive side which must also be experienced by the much-enduring man.

Corresponding to this outer tempest, we observe an inner tempest in the soul of Ulysses. “O me wretched! what is now to happen to me!” Terror unmans him for the time being; regret weakens him: “Thrice happy, four times happy the Greeks who fell on Troy’s broad plain!” Thus he goes back in memory to his heroic epoch and wishes for death then. Too late it is, for while he is lamenting, a wave strikes him and tosses him out into the deep; now he has to act, and this need of action saves him from his internal trituration, as well as from external death.

With this renewed energy of the will, a new help appears, a divine aid from the sea. For without his own strong effort, no God can rescue him, however powerful. That toss out into the waves was not without its blessing.

2. Ino Leucothea, Ino the white Goddess, beholds him with pity in his extremity she was once mortal herself but now is divine. Her function seems to be to help the shipwrecked mariner; her name reminds the reader of the white calm of the sea, elsewhere celebrated by Homer (Book X, 94; Nitzsch’s observation). Thus she appears to represent the peaceful placid mood of the marine element, which rises in the midst of the storm and imparts hope and courage, nay predicts safety. She gives her veil to Ulysses, in which commentators trace a suggestion of the fillet or sacred cloth which was given out from a temple in Samothrace, and had the power of saving the endangered mariner, if he had tied it round his body. As it is here employed, it strangely suggests a life-preserver. At any rate Ino is the calming power opposed to angry Neptune, and she works upon both the waters and the man.

“Ill-fated man,” she cries, “why hast thou so angered Neptune?” Then she changes her note: “Still he shall not destroy thee, however much he desires.” She bids him give up his raft to the anger of Neptune, throw away his clinging wet garments of Calypso, and swim to the land of the Phaeacians. Then she hands him the veil which he is to “bind beneath his breast,” and, when he has reached land, he is to throw it back into the sea. A ritual of some kind, symbolic acts we feel these to be, though their exact meaning may be doubtful. Ino, “the daughter of Cadmus,” is supposed to have been a Phoenician Goddess originally, and to have been transferred to the Greek sailor, just as his navigation came to him, partly at least, from the Phoenicians. If he girded himself with the consecrated veil of Leucothea, the Goddess of the calm, Neptune himself in wrath could not sink him.

Such was the faith required of Ulysses, but now comes the internal counterstroke: his skepticism. “Ah me! what if some God is planning another fraud against me, bidding me quit my raft!” The doubter refuses to obey and clings to his raft. But the waves make short work of it now, and Ulysses by sheer necessity has to do as the Goddess bade him; “with hands outspread he plunged into the sea,” the veil being underneath him. When he quits his raft, and is seen in the water, Neptune dismisses him from view with a parting execration, and Pallas begins to help him, not openly, but indirectly.

In such manner the great doubter is getting toward shore, but even here his doubts cease not. Steep jutting cliffs may not permit him to land, the billows may dash him to death on the sharp shoaly rocks, or carry him out again to sea, or some huge monster of the deep may snap him up in its jaws; thus he is dashed about internally, on the billows of doubt. But this grinding within is stopped by the grinding he gets without; a mighty surge overwhelms him, he clutches a rock and saves himself, but leaves flakes of flesh from his hands behind on the rock. “He swam along the coast and eyed it well,” he even reaches the mouth of a soft-flowing river, where was a smooth beach and a shelter from the wind. Here is the spot so long desired, here then he passes to an act of faith, he prays to the river which becomes at once to the Greek imagination a God.

3. This brings us to the third water deity, and we observe a kind of scale from the universal one, Neptune, down to a local one, that of the river. The middle one, Ino, is the humane kindly phase of the great deep, showing her kinship with man; Neptune was the ruder god of the physical sea, and, to the Homeric Greek, the most powerful and natural. No wonder that he was angry at that little raft and its builder; it meant his ultimate subjection.

The prayer of Ulysses to the River-God is, on the whole, the finest passage in the present Book. It shows him now a man of faith, humbled though he be to the last degree of misery: “Hear me, ruler, whoever thou art, I approach thee much-besought. The deathless Gods revere the prayer of him who comes to them and asks for mercy, as I now come to thy stream. Pity, ruler, me thy suppliant.” Certainly a lofty recognition of the true nature of deity; no wonder that the River stayed his current, smoothed the waves and made a calm before him. Such a view of the Gods reveals to us the inner depths of the Hero’s character; it calls to mind that speech of Phoenix in the Iliad (Book Ninth) where he says that the Gods are placable. As soon as Ulysses makes this utterance from his heart, he is saved, the Divine Order is adjusted to his prayer, he having of course put himself into harmony with the same. He has no longer any need of the protecting veil of the sea-goddess Ino, having escaped from the angry element, and obtained the help of the new deity belonging to the place. He restores the veil to the Goddess according to her request, in which symbolic act we may possibly read a consecration of the object which had saved him, as well as a recognition of the deity: “This veil of salvation belongs not to me, but to the Goddess.” Not of his strength alone was he saved from the waves.

Such is one side of Ulysses, that of faith, of the manifestation of the godlike in man, especially when he is in the very pinch of destruction. But Ulysses would not be Ulysses, unless he showed the other side too, that of unfaith, weak complaint, and temporary irresolution. So, when he is safe on the bank of the stream, he begins to cry out: “What now am I to suffer more! If I try to sleep on this river’s brink for the night, the frost and dew and wind will kill me; and if I climb this hill to yonder thicket, I fear a savage beast will eat me while I slumber.” It is well to be careful, O Ulysses, in these wild solitudes; now let the petulant outburst just given, be preparatory to an act of will which will settle the problem. “He rose and went to the wood near by; he crept under two bushes that grew from the same place, one the wild and the other the tame olive.” There in a heap of leaves man’s first bed he slept under the intertwined branches of the two olives nature’s shelter against wind, rain, sun. He, with all his cultivation is quite reduced to the condition of the primitive man.

One cannot help feeling a symbolic intention in these two olive trees, one wild and one cultivated. They represent in a degree the two phases of the man sleeping under them; they hint also the transition which he is making from the untamed nature of Calypso’s island to the more civilized land of Phaeacia. The whole Book is indeed the movement to a new life and a new country. We might carry out the symbolic hint much further on these lines, and see a meaning in their interwoven branches and the protection they are giving at present; but the poetic suggestion flashing afar over poem backwards and forwards is the true effect, and may be dimmed by too much explanation.

Such is this marvelous storm with its ship-wreck, probably the first in literature, but often made use of since. The outer surges of the tempest are indeed terrific; but the main interest is, that along with this external description of the storm, we witness the corresponding internal heaving and tossing of a human soul. Everywhere we notice that Ulysses doubts at first, doubts Calypso, doubts Ino, doubts even his final safety when on land. He is the skeptical man, he never fails to call up the possibilities on the other side. Though a God give the promise, he knows that there are other Gods who do not promise, or may give a different promise to somebody else. It is the experience of life, this touch of doubt at first; it always accompanies the thinking man, who, like Ulysses, must be aware of a negative counterpart even to truth. Not pleasant, but painful is this doubt shooting through the soul, and keeping it in distress and often in lamentation. So even the Hero breaks out into unmanly complaint, and reveals to the full his finite nature.

Yet if Ulysses doubts, he always overcomes his doubt in the end; he sees the positive element in the world to be deeper than the negative one, after a little access of weakness. Under his doubt is the deeper layer of faith, so he never gives up, but valiantly holds on and conquers. The Gods come to his aid when he believes and acts. His intellect is doubt, his will is faith: wherein we may trace important lines which unite him with Faust, the chief character in our last world-poem. Ulysses will complain, and having freed his mind, will go to work and conquer the obstacle. He struggles with the billow, clinging to the mast, though he had just said: “Now I shall die a miserable death.”

Parallel to this human side runs the divine side, which we need not further describe here, with its three water-deities. A little attention we may give to the part of Pallas. At one time she seems to control the outer world for her favorite, sending the wind or stopping it; then she is said to inform his mind with forecast, that he may do the thing in spite of wind or other obstacle; finally he often does the deed without any divine suggestion, acting through himself. In these stages we can see a transition of the Mythus. The first stage is truly mythical, in which the deity is the mover, the second is less so, the Goddess having become almost wholly internal; in the third stage the mythical is lost. All these stages are in Homer and in this Book, though the first is still paramount.

Taking into view the general character of the mythical movement of this Fifth Book, we observe that there is a rise in it from a lower to a higher form; Calypso and Neptune are intimately blended with their physical environments, the island and the sea. Though elevated into persons, they are still sunk in Nature; it is the function of the Hero, especially the wise man, to subordinate both or to transcend both: which is just what Ulysses has done. His Mythus is, therefore, a higher one, telling the story of the subjection of nature and of her Gods. This story marks one phase of his career.

The reader will probably be impressed with the fact that in the present Book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. It is not simply sensuous gratification with the mind still whole and capable of resolution, as was the case with Ulysses in the realm of Circe, in which he shows his will-power, though coupled with indulgence. Such is the difference between Calypso and Circe, which is always a problem with the reader. In this way, too, we see how the Fifth Book before us is a direct continuation and unfolding out of the Twelfth Book. Indeed the very movement of the poem is significant, which is a going backwards; so Ulysses drops far to the rear out of that light-loving Island of the Sun, against which is his violation, when he comes to Ogygia.

But Ulysses has now, after long discipline, transcended this sphere, and has reached a new land, of which the account is to follow next.