branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever; leaving us
northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow, their example? To
produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in
every faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of education. To
produce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer,
and not of--But I am treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that
the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while
his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for this,
that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks,
Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented on the Athenian
stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not--for he had no
voice--himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing in
which he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, to play at
ball amid the chorus of Nausicaa's maidens.

That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play of
Sophocles', I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we have no
second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so
grand, and yet so tender, of Homer's idyllic episode.

Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king. But not of a
king in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern sense. Her father,
Alcinous, is simply "primus inter pares" among a community of merchants,
who are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor for life--so to speak--of a
new trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the shore of the
Mediterranean. But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her "carved
chamber," is "like the immortals in form and face;" and two handmaidens
who sleep on each side of the polished door "have beauty from the
Graces."