ary
conflict between two quarrelsome borderers, but it cuts to the very
marrow of the World's History, the grand struggle between East and
West. Family and State are most deeply concerned in it, the restoration
of the wife is the main object of the Trojan War, which the chieftains
of Greece must conclude victoriously or perish. A new world was being
born on this side of the AEgean, and the Greeks were its first shapers
and its earliest defenders. This occidental world, whose birth is the
real thing announced at Troy in that marvelous cradle-song of Europe,
called the Iliad, has already begun its career, and shows its earliest
period in Phaeacia. It is no wonder, then, that the Phaeacian people wish
to hear the Trojan song, and it alone, and that the Phaeacian poet
wishes to sing the Trojan song, and it alone.

Thus we behold in the present Book a quiet idyllic folk on their island
home out in the West listening to the mighty struggle of their race,
with dim far-off anticipations of all that it involved. Nor were the
women indifferent. Arete, the wife and center of the Family, is not
henceforth to be exposed to the fate of Helen; think what would Phaeacia
be without her, or she without Phaeacia; think what she would be in
Troy, for instance. Strong emotions must rise in the breasts of all the
people at hearing such a song.

But still stronger emotions well out of the heart of Ulysses. He is one
of the heroes of the Trojan War not yet returned, a living image of its
sacrifices. Of course, he is the main hero sung of by the bard in the
present Book; such is the artistic adaptation of the Homeric work,
clearly done with a conscious design. Ulysses has already passed
through several stages--Calypso, Nausicaa, Arete; now he has reached
the poet, Demodocus certainly, and perchance Homer himself, who is to
sing not only of the Trojan War, but also of its consequences--this
rise of man's spiritual hierarchy as here unfolded, from Nature, into
Institutions, and thence into Art. After hearing Demodocus, Ulysses
picks up the thread and becomes his own poet, narrating his adventures
in Fairyland with the free full swing of the Homeric hexameter. Thus he
acquires and applies in his own way the art of Phaeacia; the arch of his
life spans over from the heroic fighter before Troy to the romantic
singer before the Phaeacian court.

It is plain, therefore, that this Book is distinctively the Book of the
Bard. In the experience of Ulyss