ods. But Minerva gives
him a strong lesson, so does Nestor. He obtains a glimpse of the Divine
Order, and feels the necessity of keeping in harmony with the same. The
outcome of his visit must impress him with the providential side in
human action.

2. He sees new countries, talks with famous men, and partakes of their
wisdom. Chiefly, however, he hears of the grand Return in its manifold
phases; he learns the story of those who failed, of those who reached
home, like Nestor and Menelaus. Great is the lesson; this Return images
the movement of the soul, the breach within and the restoration. It is
remotely his own inner life outlined, and that of every man; Telemachus
has just made a separation from home and country, to which he must come
back and be reconciled. His own soul-form he must dimly feel in the
great Return of the Heroes from Troy, and their various destinies he
must recognize to be his own possibilities.

3. Telemachus the aspiring youth, is trying to recover his patrimony,
which is of two kinds, physical and spiritual. The Suitors are
destroying the one, and keeping it out of his hands; with them is one
conflict, that of justice. But he must also inherit his father's mental
riches; he has to separate from home and his mother to find this form
of wealth or even to learn of its nature. So Telemachus has his Trojan
expedition, not so great in itself, yet, adventurous enough for a boy.
He is moving on the lines of his father when the latter went to Troy--a
national affair; but his deed is a breaking loose from boyhood--the
breach out of which he is to come back a man.

4. The form of this educative process of the Odyssey is very different
from ours. It seizes hold of the mythical element in man, and the
reader of to-day is to penetrate to the meaning by something of an
effort. Telemachus is to see Helen; what does that signify in
education? He is to hear the Tale of Proteus and feel its purport in
relation to his own discipline. One asks: Is not this imaginative form
still a vital element of education? The Odyssey has been and is now a
school-book of the race.

_THE ULYSSIAD._

We have now reached the second grand division of the poem, the Odyssey
proper, which we have named under necessity the Ulyssiad, and which
gives an account of the adventures of Ulysses before he comes to Ithaca
and joins Telemachus. If the division which we have just had may be
called the education of a youth, this division