is rounded off to completeness, and becomes a true totality.
Why should he not apply the same law to nature, to the whole Earth, and
behold it, not indefinitely extended as it appears to the senses, but
returning into itself, whereby the line becomes a circle and the plain
a globe? Some such need lay deep in his poetic soul, to which he had to
harmonize the entire universe, visible as well as invisible. Not
science is this, but an immediate vision of the true, always prophetic,
which observes the impress of spirit everywhere upon the realm of
matter. The old Greek sages seem to have known not merely of the
rotundity of the Earth, but also of its movement round the Sun and upon
its own axis, both movements being circular, returns, which image mind.
Did they get their knowledge from Egypt or Chaldea? Questionable; if
they looked inwardly deep enough, they could find it all there. Indeed
the sages of Egypt and Chaldea saw the fact in their souls ere they saw
it or could see it in the skies.

So these Homeric glimpses into the realm of what is to become science
are not to be neglected or despised, in spite of their mythical,
ambiguous vesture. Moreover they are in profound harmony with the
present poem, to which they furnish remote, but very suggestive
parallels, making the physical universe correspond to the spiritual
unfolding of the Hero.

Ulysses, accordingly, comes back to the sensible world and there he
finds Circe again. Indeed whom else ought he to find? She is the bright
Greek realm of the senses reposing in sunlight; she has been
subordinated to the rational, she is no longer the indulgence of
appetite which turns men to swine, nor is she, on the other hand, the
rigid ascetic. Hence we need not be surprised at her bringing good
things to eat and drink: "bread and many kinds of meat and sparkling
red wine." Moreover, she is still prophetic, she still has the outlook
upon the Beyond, being spirit in the senses. Her present prophecies,
however, will be different from her former one, she will point to the
supersensible, not in Hades, for that is now past, but in the
Upperworld of life and experience. Such is the return of the Hero to
Circe, the fair, the terrestrial, who makes existence beautiful if she
be properly held in restraint; beautiful as sunlit Hellas with its
plastic forms she can become, in striking contrast to the dark shapes
of the sunless Underworld which leads to the Gorgon, the realm of
spooks, shad