world, but into the
other world, and bring back thence the news concerning those who have
already departed.

This then is the supreme Return of the Hero, the Return from beyond
life, still alive; he is to conquer not only the monster Polyphemus and
the enchantress Circe, but also the greatest goblin of all, Death.
Common mortals have to make the passage thither without returning; the
Hero must be the grand exception, else he were no Hero. Transcendent
must he be, rising above all limits, even the limit of life and death.

We have, therefore, in the present Book the Greek glance into
immortality. This is the essence of it, hence its prodigious hold upon
human kind. That the conscious individual persists after the
dissolution of the physical body is here strongly affirmed; indeed the
world beyond is organized, and its connection with the world on this
side is unfolded, in a series of striking pictures for the imagination.
It is thus a grand chapter in the history of the soul's consciousness
of its eternal portion, is in fact the middle link between the Oriental
and the Christian view of immortality.

Ulysses, as the wise man, or rather as the intellectual Hero of his
age, must go through the experience in question; he cannot return to
home and country, and be fully reconciled with his institutional life
here and now, without having seen what is eternal and abiding in the
soul. The wanderer must wander thither, the absolute necessity lies
upon him--and he must fetch back word about what he saw, and thus be a
mediator between the sensible and supersensible, between time and
eternity. In that way he means something to his people, becomes, in
fact, their Great Man, helping them vicariously in this life to rise
beyond life. The complete Return, then, involves the descending to
Hades, the beholding the shapes there, and the coming back with the
report to the living. Perhaps we ought to consider just this to be the
culmination of the whole journey, the grand adventure embracing all
possible adventures.

The connection with the preceding Book can not be too strongly
enforced. Circe points out the way to Ulysses; her nature is to point
to the Beyond, to which she cannot herself pass. In her last phase, she
was spirit, but still in the sensuous form; that spirit in her, as in
all true art and even in the world, points to its pure realm, where it
is freed from the trammels of the senses. This gives the main
characteristic of Ho