“These marvellous ships, endued with human sense, and anticipating the will of their masters, flit unseen over the sea.”—“Homer’s Odyssey,” by W. W. Merry and James Riddell, Oxford, 1886, Vol. I. p. 353, note.
“That our ships in their minds may know it when they bring thee hither to hand,
Because amidst us Phæacians, our ships no helmsmen steer,
Nor with us is any rudder like other ships must bear,
But our keels know the minds of menfolk, and their will they understand,
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And therewith exceeding swiftly over the sea-gulf do they go,
In the mist and the cloud-rack hidden....”
“The Odyssey of Homer,” translated by Wm. Morris, London, 1887, p. 145.
The afore-named construction is not, however, alluded to by Matthew Arnold in his well-known lectures given at Oxford, nor by the Right Hon. Wm. Ewart Gladstone either in his “Juventus Mundi” or throughout his very extensive “Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age.”