tire demonic
brood, which he has begotten, and which he has to fight and subject. At
the same time these fantastic shapes are typical, and shadow forth the
universal experience of man, belonging to all countries and all ages.

As already stated, there are three different localities to which
Ulysses is brought. Three islands, bounded, yet in a boundless sea,
through which he moves on his ships; such is the outermost setting of
nature, suggestive of much. No tempest occurs in this Book; the stress
is upon the three fixed places in the unfixed aqueous element.

I. First is the island where dwells AEolus with his Family; hither
Ulysses comes after putting down Polyphemus who was hostile to domestic
life. In this spot the bag of winds is given into the possession of the
navigator, whose companions, however, release them, and he is driven to
the starting-point, with the winds at large. AEolus refuses to receive
him the second time.

II. Next is the city of the Laestrigonians, where is a civil life, a
State, to which Ulysses can come after subjecting the Cyclops, who had
no polity of the sort. But the State is verily a giant, a cannibal to
him now, with all the winds loose. Hence he has to flee for his life.
Whither now does he go?

III. Not to Penelope and Ithaca, but to Circe, and her isle. She is the
form which next rises before Ulysses, banished from the domestic world
of AEolus, and fleeing from the civil life of the Laestrigonians.

We shall try to bring the threads of connection to light, for it is our
emphatic opinion that these three islands with their shapes are
spiritually bound and wound together. Still further, they reach back
and interlink with the forms of the previous Book, which furnish
antecedent stages of the grand total movement of Fairyland. Separated
in image are these islands and their inhabitants, but they have to be
united in thought. Not a more accident is the sequence, but a
necessity, a strict evolution. The work here, according our best
belief, is organic, and the reader must not rest contented with his
understanding of it, till he moves with the poet from place to place by
the interior path of the spirit.

I.

The first fact about the AEolian Isle is that it was afloat in the
waters of the sea, as Delos and other islands of antiquity were
reported to be. Not stationary then; the king of it, AEolus, has a name
which indicates a changeable nature, veering about like the winds, of
which he