ngodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves
the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they
themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in
their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass
from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when
among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals,
those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor
divine--at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus,
or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in
the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home
across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that
unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many
Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit
death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to
stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.

But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still
insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading
sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to
have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of
mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like
spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail
nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried,
and bore them wherever they would go?--or the wild end of the ship which
carried Ulysses home?--or that terrible piece of second sight in the
Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?--or those
islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into
being to complete the number?--or those mystical sheep and oxen, which
knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and
whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?--or Helen singing
round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's
heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear
wife far away beyond the sea?

In the far gates of the Loestrygones, 'where such a narrow rim of
night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a
double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving hom