I have felt them already, and expect to feel them more, as I grow
older. But then that lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope! What in
the world could we do without her? Hope spiritualises the earth; Hope
makes it always new; and, even in the earth's best and brightest aspect,
Hope shows it to be only the shadow of an infinite bliss hereafter!
CHAPTER IX
THE CYCLOPS
When the great city of Troy was taken, all the chiefs who had fought
against it set sail for their homes. But there was wrath in heaven
against them, for indeed they had borne themselves haughtily and cruelly
in the day of their victory. Therefore they did not all find a safe and
happy return. For one was shipwrecked, and another was shamefully slain
by his false wife in his palace, and others found all things at home
troubled and changed, and were driven to seek new dwellings elsewhere.
And some, whose wives and friends and people had been still true to them
through those ten long years of absence, were driven far and wide about
the world before they saw their native land again. And of all, the wise
Ulysses was he who wandered farthest and suffered most.
He was well-nigh the last to sail, for he had tarried many days to do
pleasure to Agamemnon, lord of all the Greeks. Twelve ships he had with
him--twelve he had brought to Troy--and in each there were some fifty
men, being scarce half of those that had sailed in them in the old days,
so many valiant heroes slept the last sleep by Simois and Scamander, and
in the plain and on the seashore, slain in battle or by the shafts of
Apollo.
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