old Hellas the tale of Nausicaa
was wrought over into various shapes after Homer; it was transformed
into a drama, love-story, as well as idyl. The myth-making spirit did
not let it drop, but kept unfolding it; later legend, for instance,
brought about a marriage between Telemachus and Nausicaa. Our recent
greatest poet, Goethe, also responded mightily to the story of
Nausicaa; he planned a drama on the subject, of which the outline is to
be found in his published works. He did not find time to finish his
poem, but there is evidence that he thought much about it and carried
it around with him, for a long period. One regrets that the German poet
was not able to give this new transformation of his ancient Greek
brother, with whom he has manifested on so many lines an intimate
connection and poetical kinship. In portions of the _Italian
Journey_ specially we see how deeply the Odyssey was moving him and
how he was almost on the point of reproducing the whole poem with its
marine scenery. But Nausicaa in particular fascinated him, and it would
have been the best commentary on the present Book to have seen her in a
now grand poetic epiphany in the modern drama of Goethe.

_BOOK SEVENTH._

If the last Book was Nausicaa's, this one is Arete's; there is the
transition from the daughter to the mother, from the maiden to the
wife. Still it is not quite so emphatically a woman's Book, since the
wife has to include the husband in her world. Ulysses now goes to the
center of the Family, to its heart, that he may meet with compassion.
Still she withholds her sympathy at first for a good reason; Arete is
not wholly impulse and feeling, she has thought, reflection. So, after
all, it is left to the men to take up the suppliant.

Very surprising to us moderns is the picture drawn by the old Greek
poet of this woman, and of her position: "the people look upon her as a
God when she goes through the city;" her mind is especially praised;
she has a judicial character, supposed usually to be alien to women:
"she decides controversies among men," or perchance harmonizes them. To
be sure her position is stated as exceptional: "her husband honors her,
as no other woman on earth is honored;" she is evidently his counselor
as well as wife. Thus the poet would have us regard Arete not merely as
a person of kind feelings and of sweet womanly instincts, but she has
also the highest order of intelligence; she is united with her husband
in