ations, such as his doings with
Polyphemus and Circe, till his career in Fableland winds up with
destroying the Oxen of the Sun. This is the extreme negative act which
throws him back beyond Circe's into Calypso's realm. He assaults really
his own will in this last act, he undermines his own power of recovery,
he puts out his own light. Circe would have sent him forward again,
leaving intact his will-power; Calypso detains him lulled in the
sensuous delights of her bower. He denies his own reason; how then can
he rise after a fall? Indeed what use is there of rising? So he sinks
down into Ogygia, the Dark Island.

2. It is no wonder, therefore, that he remained with Calypso seven
years and more, draining to the dregs the cup of that life. Still he
has desire to return home, must have it, he must possess reason to deny
reason. He longs for what he has not, sensuous charms cannot drown his
aspiration; such is the Hell in which he has placed himself. Still even
here when he has passed his probation, he must be released by a decree
of the Gods, who, formerly favorable to Neptune, the divine foe of
Ulysses, have now become friendly to Minerva, the Hero's protectress.
Why this change in the everlasting powers? When Ulysses is ready to
leave Ogygia, the Gods cannot keep him there, they have to change; the
divine Order must help him escape, if it be divine. This is just what
happens; Zeus, voice of the Olympian law, commands his departure, and
Calypso must obey.

3. Ulysses, then, comes to Phaeacia, an institutional land with social,
domestic, and political life. From the grot of Calypso he passes to the
home of Arete; both woman and man are in an ethical relation. He sees a
world of peace and harmony, he witnesses the corrective of his own
negative Trojan experience. He, having taken Phaeacia into himself, has
a remedy for distracted Ithaca; he has beheld an ideal to which he can
adjust his own land. He was not the man to bring civil order to Ithaca
just after the destruction of Troy; now he has passed through his own
destructive phases, has become conscious of them, has told them to the
Phaeacians, which long account has in it the character of a confession.
All is given in a mythical form, but it is none the less an
acknowledgment of error from first to last. He is the poetical
confessor of himself, and the Phaeacians are contemplating the grand
experience in the mirror of art.

We may now see the reason why the poet began