e difference between Calypso and
Circe, which is always a problem with the reader. In this way, too, we
see how the Fifth Book before us is a direct continuation and unfolding
out of the Twelfth Book. Indeed the very movement of the poem is
significant, which is a going backwards; so Ulysses drops far to the
rear out of that light-loving Island of the Sun, against which is his
violation, when he comes to Ogygia.

But Ulysses has now, after long discipline, transcended this sphere,
and has reached a new land, of which the account is to follow next.

_BOOK SIXTH._

We are now to make one of the chief transitions of the poem, we are
going to pass from the Dark Island and the stormy sea to Phaeacia, a
bright, sunlit land, where reign peace and harmony. Moreover, we move
out of the realm of nature to that of institutions. Still more
significant are the central figures of the two localities, both women;
one of these we have seen, Calypso, who is now to give way to Nausicaa.

This Book may, therefore, be called Nausicaa's Book, as she is the
leading character in it, imparting to it a marvelous mood of idyllic
beauty and womanly purity. She is the person chosen by the poet to
introduce the Hero into the new realm, Phaeacia, being in sharp contrast
to Calypso, who detained Ulysses in dark Ogygia away from his family,
and whose character was adverse to the domestic relation. But Nausicaa
shows from the start the primal instinct of the true woman for the
home. She is still young, but she has arrived at that age in which she
longs with every throb of her heart to surrender her own separate
existence, and to unite it with another. She manifests in all its
attractiveness the primordial love of the woman for the Family, basis
of all institutional life, as well as fountain of the deepest joys of
our terrestrial sojourn.

On this account she represents the place of Phaeacia in the Greek world
as well as in the present poem; perhaps we ought to add, in the whole
movement of civilization. That land may be called the idyllic one, a
land of peace and of freedom from all struggle; the borderland between
the natural and the civilized spheres. Man has risen out of the
grossness of mere sensuous individualism, such as we see in Polyphemus
and in other shapes of Fairyland; but he has not yet reached the
conflicts of higher forms of society resulting from a pursuit of
wealth, from ambition, from war. Here is a quiet half-way house on