seemed, beyond hope of return from the wife and home he had left in
Ithaca. The situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, beauty
in the story predominates over terror. And this, in part at least,
because the powers with which Odysseus has to do, are not mere forces of
nature, blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take an
interest, for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar,
and, if one may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted
under the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to the
Homeric account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one at
ease with the elements:

"Now the lord, the shaker of the earth, on his way from the Ethiopians,
espied Odysseus afar off from the mountains of the Solymi: even thence
he saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet more angered in
spirit, and wagging his head he communed with his own heart. 'Lo now, it
must be that the gods at the last have changed their purpose concerning
Odysseus, while I was away among the Ethiopians. And now he is nigh to
the Phaeacian land, where it is so ordained that he escape the great
issues of the woe which hath come upon him. But me-thinks, that even yet
I will drive him far enough in the path of suffering.'

"With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep,
grasping his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of all
manner of winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and down sped
night from heaven. The East Wind and the South Wind clashed, and the
stormy West, and the North, that is born in the bright air, rolling
onward a great wave." [Footnote: Odyss. v. 282.--Translated by Butcher
and Lang.]

The position of the hero is terrible, it is true, but not with the