are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor for life--so to speak--of a
new trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the shore of the
Mediterranean. But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her "carved
chamber," is "like the immortals in form and face;" and two handmaidens
who sleep on each side of the polished door "have beauty from the
Graces."

To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less than
Pallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the
shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth--and wash the
clothes. {72}

"Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear
Child so forgetful? This long time doth rest,
Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair.
Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest,
And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best.
These are the things whence good repute is born,
And praises that make glad a parent's breast.
Come, let us both go washing with the morn;
So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.

"Know that thy maidenhood is not for long,
Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo,
Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung.
Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew,
For wain and mules thy noble father sue,
Which to the place of washing shall convey
Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue.
This for thyself were better than essay
Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way."

Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents--

"One by the hearth sat, with the maids around,
And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent
Her morning toil. Him to the council bound,
Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found."

And calling him, as she might now, "Pappa phile," Dear Papa, asks for the
mule waggon: but it is her father's and her five brothers' clothes she
fain would wash,--

"Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear."

But he understood all--and she goes forth in the mule waggon, with the
clothes, after her mother has put in "a chest of all kinds of delicate
food, and meat, and wine in a goatskin;" and last but not least, the
indispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the bath, to which both
Jews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health and beauty. And then we
read in the simple verse of a poet too refined, like the rest of his
race, to see anything mean or ridiculous in that which was not ugly and
unnatural, how she