“I keep mine earthly wit; I have duped the Three.[38]
They gave me work for torture; work is joy.
Slaves work in chains, and to the clank they sing.’
Said Orpheus, ‘Slaves still hope!’
“‘And could I strain to heave up the huge stone
Did I not hope that it would reach the height?
There penance ends, and dawn Elysian fields.’
‘But if it never reach?’
“The Thracian sighed, as looming through the mist
The stone came whirling back. ‘Fool,’ said the ghost,
‘Then mine, at worst, is everlasting hope.’
Again uprose the stone.”
Ulysses confesses that he did not see all he might have seen; for, when the pale ghosts in their ten thousands crowded round him with wild cries, the hero lost courage, fled back to his ship, and bade his comrades loose their cables, and put out at once to sea.
They passed the island where the twin sisters, the Sirens, lay couched in flowers, luring all passing mariners to their destruction by the fascination of their song. Forewarned by Circe, the chief had stopped the ears of all his crew with melted wax, and had made them bind him to the mast, giving them strict charge on no account to release him, however he might entreat or threaten—for he himself, true to his passion for adventure, would fain listen to these dangerous enchantresses. So, as they drifted close along the shore, the Sirens lifted their voices and sang as follows—every word of Mr Worsley’s translation is Homer’s, except the single phrase in brackets:—
“Hither, Odysseus, great Achaian name,
Turn thy swift keel, and listen to our lay;
Since never pilgrim to these regions came
In black ship [on the azure waves astray],
But heard our sweet voice ere he sailed away,
And in his joy passed on, with ampler mind.
We know what labours were in ancient day
Wrought in wide Troia, as the gods assigned;
We know from land to land all toils of all mankind.”
But the deaf crew rowed on, and not until the sound of the strain had died away in the distance did they unbind their captain, in spite of his angry protests. They pass the strait that divides Sicily from Italy, where on either hand lurked the monsters Scylla and Charybdis—impersonations, it may be, of rocks and whirlpools—but which they escaped, with the loss of six out of the crew, by help of Circe’s warnings and directions. But that our own Spenser’s ‘Faery Queen’ is perhaps even less known to the majority of English readers than the Odyssey of Homer (by grace of popular translations), it might be needless to remind them how the whole of Sir Guyon’s voyage on the “Idle Lake” is nothing more or less than a reproduction of this portion of Ulysses’ adventures.[39] The five mermaidens, who entrap unwary travellers with their melody, address the knight as he floats by in a strain which is the echo of the Sirens’—
“O thou fayre son of gentle Fäery,
That art in mightie arms most magnifyde
Above all knights that ever batteill tryde,
O turn thy rudder hitherwarde awhile:
Here may thy storme-bett vessell safely ryde:
This is the port of rest from troublous toyle,
The worldes sweet Inn from pain and wearisome turmoyle.”
The enchantress Acrasia, with her transformed lovers—the “seeming beasts who are men in deed”—is but a copy from Circe; while the “Gulf of Greediness” yawning on one side of the Lake—
“That deep engorgeth all this worldës prey”—