wild play of waters far remote, illumined for the moment by the oblique rays of the morning sun. Even such a chasm has the Homeric luminary cleft for us through the impenetrable mists which had else for ever settled on the wastes of ethnic antiquity. On the dim and distant horizon, where the lowering heavens and the dark waters seem inseparably mingling, the veil is lifted up, and lo! the vast and gorgeous diorama of "Troy divine." We behold not merely the glancing splendours of Olympus, nor some Titanic or Cabiric cloud-picture, the exhalation of a casual or arbitrary fancy; the divine art of Homer, while it obliterates his own personality, brings before our eyes the whole inner and outward life of a world as distinctly individualized, yet endlessly varied as though it had been projected by the silent and spontaneous energies of Nature herself. And as in every act of creation the forming hand moves from within, but is itself unrecognized or unknown, so it has befallen with Homer, hidden behind his great work, to have his age, his country, even his individuality questioned, while tradition points, with unhesitating confidence, to the coast where Troy sank before the wrath of Pelides, and states and dynasties have referred their pretensions to the Homeric record of the royal house of Atreus.

nature, indeed, is not entirely dissipated in death, for the spirit dreads a wound, and performs many of the functions of its former life.* The sentiments and habits remain much the same as before, drawing the ghosts into separate societies and classes. In the case of the mighty hunter Orion, "the very beasts" which he had slain upon "the lonely mountains" above, form the objects of his pursuit over "the meads of asphodel" below; which would imply (if any consistency is to be looked for in such reveries) that the brute creation shares the ghostly immortality of the human race.

When Ulysses is to be dispatched to these spectral regions in order to consult the prophet Tiresias, he is but told to lift his sail, and a magic wind, supplied by Circè, speeds him on his destined course. All day he ploughs an unknown waste; it is only when "night rushes on the deep" that he reaches the dreary coast, which no sun ever visits: where trees, consecrated to the grave, the poplar and willow, deepen the gloom of the perpetual twilight, and the infernal rivers rush onward to their ghastly destination. Beyond spreads ocean still more awful in its inarticulate mystery, because not even conjecture as yet dared to picture an ulterior boundary, and in the ear of the Greek mariner the wail of spirits mingled strangely with the roar of its never-resting waters.

"ILLIC umbrarum tenui stridere volantum, Flebilis auditur questus."

The poet who has glven us this transcript of actual life has not left us without a glimpse into the shadowy region which lies beyond it. The Hades of Homer is separated from the living world by unpiloted waters. Unlike that of Virgil, its point of access is left undeter- The ancients, after all, seem to have been but mined, nor are we told more than that it exists poorly off in the matter of necromancy. They somewhere on "old ocean's utmost bounds." knew but one form, which is devolved with little But ocean was then the circumfluent stream variation from Homer to Lucan. The blood of which bound the earth in its mighty girdle, black animals, honey, wine, and milk, were esstretching away or sinking down into gulfstablished ingredients in the classic incantation. from which the mind might well recoil in perplexity and dismay. There Hades withdrew itself from the gaze of living men, deep beneath the foundations of the solid earth; and Tartarus hid in still lower depths that monstrous brood of Titans whom, as the enemies of order and symmetry, neither the gods nor Greek art could ever love to look upon. As for Elysium, the fair island of the blest, its image floated before the imagination of the Greeks under very uncertain conditions, both as to place and inhabitants. Its idea might be suggested by the feeling which, we know, never ceased to importune and allure mankind, so long as it was possible to believe that our earth concealed some nook where man and

nature revelled in unfading youth and guiltless enjoyment. The mariner's compass was sure, sooner or later, to disenchant the world of that pleasing illusion.

It is to the ingenuity of modern times that we owe the recondite learning and endless distinctions upon this subjeet, which formed a labour of love to commentators like Bodinus, and which leave us to infer that the Father of lies-" veterator ille Satanas"-to whom such works are attributed, had acquired latterly more skill in his vocation, or had found, at least, more versatile agents. The spells of Ulysses,

In the single instance of Hercules, the Eidolon or image is in Hades, the spirit in heaven among the gods. Here we have the first intimation of a compound spiritual nature in man, which was afterward greatly refined upon by the Platonists and later poets. Ovid makes an accurate distribution of the component principles as understood in his day :

"Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra, Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit."

Hades, then, in its most comprehensive sense The notion about the stars, however, is peculiarly as the general receptacle of the dead, is limited, Roman; and, as has been justly remarked, "it is according to Homer, to the extreme borders of always necessary to distinguish the ideas of the Latin the earth and the abyss beneath it. The super-poets, after the religion of ancient Latium had been incumbent ether is the habitation of the gods. Man, even in his disembodied condition, gravitates toward his native abode. His corporeal

blended with that of Greece, from the more simple, consistent, and dignified system of the Greeks in the days of Homer and Hesiod."

however, if simple, are effectual. No sooner does the blood fill the foss around the extemporized altar than all Hades is moved from beneath, and the pale nations throng with wild tumult to the scene of evocation. The brandished falchion is necessary to coerce them into order. An opportunity is thus offered, such as Homer never neglects, of entering upon a personal and genealogical description of the worthies, whether male or female, of prehistoric Greece.

First of the visionary throng advance the shades of women; whether assigned to this precedence through a spirit of gallantry rather unusual with Greek writers, or else by a quiet stroke of satire toward the sex, whom, in this very place, the poet taxes for an inquisitiveness which it is not always safe to gratify.

"Warned by my ills, beware," the shade replies,
'Nor trust the sex that is so rarely wise;
When earnest to explore thy secret breast,
Unfold some trifle, but conceal the rest."

In this procession of fair but mournful shapes,
the glory of a yet older Greece, each successive
apparition is distinguished by her appropriate
legend. Most of these, it is true, are of such a
nature as to make it clear that credulity must
have been the point of honour in ancient Hellas.
To doubt the divinity of Zeus or Poiseidon
would have cast a horrible shade on the fair
fame of the "first families" of the land.

The Eupatrides, or Greek gentleman, must have been as jealous for the god head of Ares as for the honour of his own grand mother. When the voice of Persephone, heard from afar, has recalled the female train, the fore ground is next occupied by the old companions in arms of Ulysses who have preceded him into Hades. Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, pass in solemn review. Finally, shadowing the horizon like clouds or night, epeμn Vukti colkws, rise, vast and terrible, the phantoms of primeval kings and criminals, who, having equalled themselves with heaven, expiate, by strange punishments, the guilt of their insane pretensions. Here Tantalus pines with famine in the midst of plenty, Tityus feeds with his living flesh the unsated vultures, and Sysiphus urges upward the "huge stone" whose rebound echoes and re-echoes for ever-in the heroics of Homer and Pope.

certainly, to reconcile some of the accessories with any notions which we at present entertain of the proprieties of ghostly demeanour. These are traits which the modern pencil would cast discreetly into shade. Their prominence with Homer might be justified by the peculiarities of the medium through which he viewed them, and which could scarcely be expected to transmit metaphysical images without some distortion. Every age has thus its moral and intellectual atmosphere, possessing different degrees and modes of refraction. The world is never without its chimeras, though not always of the same pattern.

The ghosts in Homer's Hades drink the sacrificial blood with astonishing eagerness. In Olympus, the gods have at least one annual feast, in addition, we may suppose, to daily rations of nectar and ambrosia. In camp and court, kings and heroes arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of the larder, and cook, and carve and distribute food with a solemn sense of the responsibilities of the function. This whole class of Homeric phenomena, which may be called the gastronomic, some of which shock our reason, as others violate our ideas of fitness and congruity, should evidently be referred to one leading condition of human existence at the period of which they are predicated. It is in vain for Athenæus to discourse to us about the four daily meals of the Greeks in those old heroic times. As if breakfast and lunch, dinner and supper had been as well assured and regularly served at the leaguer of Troy and in the little hard-beset citadels of Pylos and Mycenoz, as in the luxurious sallis of the Palais Royale, when there is not an emeute on hand, or perhaps even when there is. As if the fruits of the earth and the herds of the field were as secure, the commissariat as effective, the purveyorship as regular, in heroic communities, that is to say, under circumstances of perpetual strife, pillage, homicide, and spoliation—as these things are wont to be; though not without woeful exceptions, in times when commerce, to say nothing of Christianity, has given us some guaranty for our daily bread. No such regular system of feeding could possibly have existed at the time of which we are speaking. On the contrary, the question, not of regular supply, but of possible subsistence, must have assumed a vast, a gigantic importance in comparison with every other question of concornment of daily life. Every meal must have been as a boon wrested from the hand of danger, and the satisfaction of appetite been not less pregnant with high and stirring associa tions, than the satisfaction of revenge or hatred; the only other interest which could rival it in importance, though not in urgency.

Such, briefly, are the scenery and process of the Homeric Necyia. Apart from its details, the general conception will not be denied to possess a certain gloomy vastness and sublimity highly appropriate to the subject. The world-wanderer by his rude altar on the confines of a shoreless ocean; the throng of summoned spirits by potent spells, and floating dimly above the heavy surge; clouds tinged with the Hunger was therefore, in the eyes of Homer, lurid splendours of Hades, blended in the dis-" a sacred thing," not unworthy of gods and tance with the spectral forms of the primeval giants; these compose a scene not unworthy to have been traced by the hand of the lamented artist to whom we owe the visionary grandeurs of the "Voyage of Life." It would be difficult,

spiritual natures. It was venerable not only as "the eldest and fiercest of instincts," but, in the same way with the Eumenides, as an ever-iminent if suspended scourge. The gravity of the subject in all its relations gave it, likewise, an

But here,

pains of reflection and remorse.
probably, the poet was indebted to the simplicity
of his age, which had as yet received but little
illumination from the allegorists or the casuists.
The religious sentiment, in the meantime,
which could follow the departing spirit with no
distinctness beyond the tomb, sought to in-
demnify itself by a more scrupulous care of the
perishable elements. Hence, the transcendent
importance of the sepulchral rites, for which
even Jove is solicitous in the case of his son
Sarpedon.

æsthetic aspect, and justified the poet in lavish | ing the full pomp of his flowing hexameters upon processes which, with all their merit, are not usually thought to fall within the range of artistic description. Spits and skewers, certainly, are not in themselves objects of much inherent dignity, yet Homer haudles them with as little sense of degradation as the sword and buckler; and in Greek, it must be owned, they sound quite as euphoniously. It is just as much a matter of course for the son of Thètis to slaughter his own mutton as to carve the limbs of the Trojans; nor does he lose one atom of respectability, in Homer's estimation, when engaged in the former office more than in Not as Pope has misinterpreted these simple the latter.

"Thus did he speak, and anon upspringing, swift

footed Achilles

Slaughtered a white-wooled sheep, and his followers skinned it expertly;

Skilfully then they divided and skewered, and, care

fully roasting,

terms:

Το γαρ γέρας εστι θανόντων.

"What honours mortals after death receive, Those unavailing honours we may give :"

for, as every schoolboy knows, those honours Drew from the spits; and Automedon came, bring-lutely essential to the admission of the wanderwere not only not unavailing, but were abso

ing bread to the table,

Piled upon baskets fair; but for all of them carved

the Peleides."

The cuisine has had no such ministers and no

such honours since then. Or, if an exception is to be made in behalf of our modern literature, it is but in one solitary instance, of which the only Iliad is a short but inimitable letter by Madame de Sevignè. There, indeed, the incidents of gastronomy are once more idealized into true epic interest and solemnity. The "Grand Vatel," who is the hero of that epos, was alone worthy, of all modern masters, to have had Patroclus for a colleague and Achilles for a carver. But Homer himself has left us no testimony more convincing of the grave and even tragic interest which the exigences of the heroic era associated with the appeasement of appetite, than is given in the last melancholy conferences of Priam and Achilles over the body of Hector. Hunger is there set forth as the natural and unquestionable counterpoise of all affections, even of despair itself; and the reasoning is skilfully reinforced by allusion to another instance in which this grand prophylactic had proved its efficacy under circumstances of still more wide and wasting desolation than those of Priam:

"For not unmindful of food in her sorrow was Niobe, fair haired;

Albeit she in her dwelling lamented for twelve of her offspring,,

Done unto death by Apollo and Artemis, arrowdelighting."

If the psychology of Homer is, from the above and other causes, obscure and inconsistent, it may be said, on the other hand, that his views of the moral or penal condition of the dead are more reasonable then those of most Hadistic poets. His fancy expatiates in no scenes of physical torture. The pains, if any, are the

ing psyché into settled quarters. Of some permanent distinction in its after fate, Homer is by no means insensible, for he has constituted Minos the lawgiver of the dead. But, except in the case of the mighty malefactors before noticed, whose punishment, like their crimes, is exceptional, we hear of no positive infliction, and are led to infer that the poet knew nothing of the topographical divisions and penal arrangements of Hades, mapped and described with so much precision by his more sagacious

or most presumptuous successors.

One great, plaintive, and depressing sentiment, indeed, pervades the whole region. It is the absorbing and endless regret for that fair land of Greece, those loved shores of the Ægean, from which the inmates of Hades are now for ever separated. No hopelessness of return, no familiarity with the "Elysian beauty" or solemn grandeur of their new abode, can once divert them from the contemplation of their former condition. They live only in their recollections, as exiles on a strange coast, pining with sickness of the heart for that lost home. With

them the " dulces Argos" nightmares the dreams of eternity. Ajax will never forget the lost arms, nor Achilles be flattered into momentary exultation at the manifest sovereignty which attends him into Hades.

"Rather he'd choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead."

Discouraging thoughts, it must be owned, for those who might be disposed to emulate the "goddess-born" in a preference of glorious and early death to long and ignoble life. But how tax the old necrologist with inconsistency, when the error from which it springs is flagrant in every part of our own experience? Our senses and our judgment are alike deceptive in the