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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

and it was I that made it and none other. There was growing a bush of olive, long of leaf, and most goodly of growth, within the inner court, and the stem as large as a pillar. Round about this I built the chamber, till I had finished it, with stones close set, and I roofed it over well and added thereto compacted doors fitting well. Next I sheared off all the light wood of the long leaved olive, and rough-hewed the trunk upwards from the root, and smoothed it round with the adze, well and skillfully, and made straight the line thereto, and so fashioned it into the bed-post, and I bored it all with the auger. Beginning from this head-post, I wrought at the bedstead till I had finished it, and made it fair with inlaid work of gold and of silver and of ivory. Then I made fast therein a bright purple band of ox-hide. Even so I declare to thee this token, and I know not, lady, if the bedstead be yet fast in his place, or if some man has cut away the stem of the olive tree and set the bedstead otherwhere. So he spake and at once her knees were loosened, and her heart melted within her, as she knew the sure tokens that Odysseus showed her. Then she fell a-weeping, and ran straight toward him and cast her hands about his neck, and kissed his head.”

Absorbing are the plots of these poems, and wondrous the literary dexterity with which they are handled; yet these features are the least of those which make them a joy forever. In the drawing of individual character, Homer has never been excelled; and while in range he is at least equaled by our Shakespeare, it seems to me that the English poet never breathed the breath of life into so god-like yet human a creation as Odysseus, skilled in devices. Both poets are eminently objective; each is at home equally in the hut and the palace, but Shakespeare', living in a more enlightened age, has given us no sweeter specimen of girlhood than the Princess Nausicaä of the Odys­sey, nor of wifely dignity and grace than the wise Penelope, nor of gentle loveliness than poor Andromache. Achilles, noble but resentful, may be compared in these qualities with Coriolanus, but the beauteous golden-haired Achaean is infinitely more lovable than the stern Roman. Old Adam in “As You Like It” is but a silhouette of the well-rounded picture of Eumaeus, the swineherd of Ithaca. Even the gods and goddesses of Homer are endowed with pulsating life, and forever remain with us the gray-eyed Athene, the ox-eyed, white-armed Hera.

Of the form in which these images of genius present themselves, it may be said that Homer wrote in the most beautiful language that was ever spoken by human tongue; of it he had supreme command. He fitted sound to sense as no other poet has done. “No one who is a stranger to Greek literature,” says Professor Jebb, “has seen how perfect an instrument it is possible for human speech to be.” In clear­ness, in flexibility, the Greek is unrivaled, having by force of its particles the power of expressing delicate shades of thought, untranslatable except by tedious circumlo­cution. The measureof the poems iscorrespondent to our iambic hexameter, of which the most notable example in English is Longfellow’s “Evangeline”—

“ Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of Heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”

This is a classic measure, foreign to the genius of our English tongue, and no satisfac­tory translation of Homer in the native meter has ever been made. In fact, while translations are legion, no adequate rendition as a whole, in any form, has been pro­duced. The necessities of English versification so pervert the simple directness of Homer’s style, so retard his swift-winged flight, that a sympathetic presentation in prose best conveys to mind of the English readers the characteristic traits of Homer’s style. Such a version is Leaf, Myers & Lang’s of the Iliad, and Butcher & Lang’s of the Odyssey—the translations used in this paper. Yet it will readily be seen that to those who read Homer in translation, the charm of his literary style must, in a large measure, be missing. Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essays on translating Homer, expresses the hope and the belief that an English poet, capable of handling Homer in his native meter, will yet be born. “The perfect translator,” says Arnold, “must be rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought, eminently noble—in grand manner.”