Gladly would Menelaus have kept the son of his old comrade with him longer as a guest, but Telemachus is impatient to rejoin his galley, which waits for him at Pylos. His host reluctantly dismisses him, not without parting gifts; but the gift which the king would have had him take—a chariot and yoke of three swift horses—the island-prince will not accept. Ithaca has no room for horse-coursing, and he loves his rocky home all the better.
“With me no steeds to Ithaca shall sail.
Such leave I here—thy grace, thy rightful vaunt,
Lord of a level land, where never fail
Lotus, and rye, and wheat, and galingale:
No room hath Ithaca to course, no mead—
Goat-haunted, dearer than horse-feeding vale.”
There is much consternation in the palace of Ulysses when the absence of Telemachus is at last discovered. Antinous and his fellow-revellers are struck with astonishment at the bold step he has suddenly taken, and with alarm at the possible result. Antinous will man a vessel at once, and waylay him in the straits on his return. The revelation of this plot to Penelope by Medon, the herald, one of the few faithful retainers of Ulysses’ house, makes her for the first time aware of her son’s departure; for old Eurycleia has kept her darling’s secret safe even from his mother. In an agony of grief she sits down amidst her sympathising maidens, and bewails herself as “twice bereaved,” of son and husband. She lifts her prayer to Minerva, and the goddess hears. When Penelope has wept herself to sleep, there stands at the head of her couch what seems the form of her sister Iphthimè, and assures her of her son’s safety: he has a guardian about his path “such as many a hero would pray to have.” Even in her dream, Penelope is half conscious of the dignity of her visitor; and, true wife that she is, she prays the vision to tell her something of her absent husband. But such revelation, the figure tells her, is no part of its mission, and so vanishes into thin air. The sleeper awakes—it is a dream indeed; but it has left a lightness and elasticity of spirit which the queen accepts as an augury of good to come.
CHAPTER III.
ULYSSES WITH CALYPSO AND THE PHÆACIANS.
The fifth book of the poem opens with a second council of the gods. It has been remarked with some truth that the gods of the Odyssey are, on the whole, more dignified than those of the Iliad. They are divided in this poem, as well as in the other, in their loves and hates towards mortals, but their dissensions are neither so passionate nor so grotesque. Minerva complains bitterly to the Ruler of Olympus of the injustice with which her favourite Ulysses is treated, by being kept so long an exile from his home. She, too, repeats the indignant protest which the poet had before put into the mouth of Mentor, which has found vent in all times and ages, from Job and the Psalmist downwards, when in the bitterness of a wounded spirit men rebel against what seems the inequality of the justice of heaven; that “there is one event to the righteous and the wicked;” nay, that the wicked have even the best of it. “Let never king henceforth do justly and love mercy; but let him rule with iron hand and work all iniquity; for lo! what is Ulysses’ reward?” Jupiter is moved by the appeal. He at once despatches Mercury to the island of Calypso, to announce to her that Ulysses must be released from her toils; such is his sovereign will, and it must be obeyed. The description of the island-grotto in which Calypso dwells is one of the most beautiful in Homer, and it is a passage upon which our English translators have delighted to employ their very best powers. Perhaps Leigh Hunt’s version is the most simply beautiful, and as faithful as any. Mercury has sped on his errand;—
“And now arriving at the isle, he springs
Oblique, and landing with subsided wings,
Walks to the cavern ’mid the tall green rocks,
Where dwelt the goddess with the lovely locks.
He paused; and there came on him, as he stood,
A smell of cedar and of citron wood,
That threw a perfume all about the isle;
And she within sat spinning all the while,
And sang a low sweet song that made him hark and smile.
A sylvan nook it was, grown round with trees,
Poplars, and elms, and odorous cypresses,
In which all birds of ample wing, the owl
And hawk, had nests, and broad-tongued waterfowl.
The cave in front was spread with a green vine,
Whose dark round bunches almost burst with wine;
And from four springs, running a sprightly race,
Four fountains clear and crisp refreshed the place;
While all about a meadowy ground was seen,
Of violets mingling with the parsley green.”
Calypso recognises the messenger, for the immortals, says the poet, know each other always. Mercury tells his errand—a bitter one for the nymph to hear, for she has set her heart upon her mortal lover. Very hard and envious, she says, is the Olympian tyrant, to grudge her this harmless fancy. [She must have thought in her heart, though the poet does not put it into words for her, that Jupiter should surely have some sympathy for weaknesses of which he set so remarkable an example.] But she will obey, as needs she must. Ulysses shall go; only he must build himself a boat, for there is none in her island. She goes herself to announce to him his coming deliverance. She finds him sitting pensively, as is his wont, on the sea-beach, looking and longing in the direction of Ithaca.
“Companion of the rocks, the livelong light,
He dreaming on the shore, but not at rest,
With groans and tears and lingering undelight
Gazed on the pulses of the ocean’s breast.”
His heart is in his native island; but, sooth to say, he makes the best of his present captivity. He endures, if he does not heartily reciprocate, the love of his fair jailer. The correspondence in many points of these Homeric lays with the legends of mediæval Christendom, especially with those of Arthur and his Round Table, has been already noticed. It has been said also that, on the whole, the moral tone of Homer is far purer. But there is one bright creation of mediæval fiction which finds no counterpart in the song of the Greek bard. It was only Christianity—one might almost say it was only mediæval Christianity—which could conceive the pure ideal of the stainless knight who has kept his maiden innocence,—who only can sit in the “siege perilous” and win the holy Grail, “because his heart is pure.” Among all the heroes of Iliad or Odyssey there is no Sir Galahad.
Calypso obeys the behest of Jove reluctantly, but without murmuring. Goddess-like or woman-like, however, she cannot fail to be mortified at the want of any reluctance on her lover’s part to leave her. There is something touching in her expostulation:—