Laertes, whose dwelling is in Ithaca; yet if he is ordained to see his friends and come unto his well-builded house, and his own country, late may he come in evil case, with the loss of all his company, in the ship of strangers and find sorrows in his house.'

"So he spake in prayer, and the god of the dark locks heard him. And once again he lifted a stone, far greater than the first, and with one swing he hurled it, and he put forth a measureless strength, and cast it but a little space behind the dark-prowed ship, and all but struck the end of the rudder. And the sea heaved beneath the fall of the rock, but the wave bare on the ship and drave it to the further shore.

"But when we had now reached that island, where all our other decked ships abode together, and our company were gathered sorrowing, expecting us evermore, on our coming thither we ran our ship ashore upon the sand, and ourselves too stept forth upon the seabeach. Next we took forth the sheep

of the Cyclops from out the hollow ship, and divided them, that none through me might go lacking his proper share. But the ram for me alone my goodly-greaved company chose out, in the dividing of the sheep, and on the shore I offered him up to Zeus, even to the son of Cronos, who dwells in the dark clouds, and is lord of all, and I burnt the slices of the thighs. But he heeded not the sacrifice, but was devising how my decked ships and my dear company might perish utterly. Thus for that time we sat the livelong day, until the going down of the sun, feasting on abundant flesh and sweet wine. And when the sun had sunk and darkness had come on, then we laid us to rest upon the seabeach. So soon as early Dawn shone forth, the rosy-fingered, I called to my company, and commanded them that they should themselves climb the ship and loose the hawsers. So they soon embarked and sat upon the benches, and sitting orderly smote the gray sea water with their oars.

"Thence we sailed onward stricken at heart, yet glad as men saved from death, albeit we had lost our dear companions."

ULYSSES.

BY ALFRED TENNYSON.

[ALFRED TENNYSON, BARON TENNYSON: English poet; born at Somersby, England, August 6, 1809; died at Aldworth, October 6, 1892. His first poems were published with his brother Charles' in a small volume entitled "Poems of Two Brothers," in 1827. Two years later he won the chancellor's gold medal for his prize poem, "Timbuctoo." The following year came his "Poems Chiefly Lyrical." In 1832 a new volume of miscellaneous poems was published, and was attacked savagely by the Quarterly Review. Ten years afterward another volume of miscellaneous verse was collected. In 1847 he published "The Princess," which was warmly received. In 1850 came "In Memoriam," and he was appointed poet laureate to succeed Wordsworth. Among his other works may be mentioned: "Idylls of the King" (1859), "Enoch Arden" and "The Holy Grail" (1869), "Queen Mary (1875), "Harold" (1876), "The Cup" (1884), “Tiresias" (1885), "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), "The Foresters" and "The Death of Enone" (1892)].

Ir little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail :

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with meThat ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

NATURE AND MAN IN GREECE.

BY ERNST CURTIUS.

(From "History of Greece.")

[ERNST CURTIUs, one of the leading modern historians of Greece, antiquarian, geographer, and philologist, was born at Lübeck, Germany, September 2, 1814; died July, 1896. He studied philology at Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin, and spent 1837-1840 in Greece as tutor to Brandis, the confidential adviser to King Otho, then with K. O. Müller; graduated at Halle in 1841. He became extraordinary professor in the University of Berlin, tutor to the Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick; in 1856 professor at Göttingen; in 1868 ordinary professor of classical archæology at Berlin, and director of the cabinet of antiquities in the Royal Museum. He has been permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, president of the Archæological Society, and editor of the Archæological Journal, and founded the German Archæological Institute at Athens. In 1874 he was German commissioner to Greece to negotiate for permission to excavate at Olympia. His chief works are "Peloponnesus" (1851-1852), "History of Greece" (1852-1867), a standard work, but most valuable for the exhaustive topographical knowledge brought to bear on historical problems,— "The Ionians and their Migrations" (1855), "Attic Studies" (1864), "Seven Maps of Athens" (1886), "History of the City of Athens" (1891).]

WE speak of Europe and Asia, and involuntarily allow these terms to suggest to us two distinct quarters of the globe, separated from one another by natural boundaries. But where are these boundaries? Possibly a frontier line may be found in the north, where the Ural Mountains cut through the broad complexes of land; but to the south of the Pontus nature has nowhere severed east from west, but rather done her utmost closely and inseparably to unite them. The same mountain ranges which pass across the Archipelago extend on dense successions of islands over the Propontis: the coast lands on either side belong to one another as if they were two halves of one country and harbors such as Thessalonica and Athens have from the first been incomparably nearer to the coast towns of Ionia than to their own interior, while from the western shores of their own continent they are still farther separated by broad tracts of land and by the difficulties of a lengthy sea voyage.

:

Sea and air unite the coasts of the Archipelago into one connected whole; the same periodical winds blow from the Hellespont as far as Crete, and regulate navigation by the same conditions, and the climate by the same changes. Scarcely a single point is to be found between Asia and Europe where, in clear weather, a mariner would feel himself left in a solitude

between sky and water; the eye reaches from island to island, and easy voyages of a day lead from bay to bay. And therefore at all times the same nations have inhabited either shore, and since the days of Priam the same languages and customs have obtained both here and there. The Greek of the islands is as much at home at Smyrna as he is at Nauplia; Salonichi lies in Europe, and yet belongs to the trading towns of the Levant; notwithstanding all changes of political circumstances, Byzantium to this day ranks as the metropolis on either side; and as one swell of the waves rolls from the shore of Ionia up to Salamis, so neither has any movement of population ever affected the coast on one side without extending itself to the other. Arbitrary political decisions have in ancient and modern times separated the two opposite coasts, and used some of the broader straits between the islands as boundary lines; but no separation of this kind has ever become more than an external one, nor has any succeeded in dividing what nature has so clearly appointed for the theater of a common history.

As decided as the homogeneous character of the coast lands, which lie opposite one another from east to west, is the difference between the regions in the direction from north to south. On the northern border of the Ægean Sea no myrtle leaf adorns the shore, and the climate resembles that of a district of Central Germany; no southern fruit grows in any part of Roumelia.

With the 40th degree of latitude a new region begins. Here, on the coasts, and in the sheltered valleys, occur the first signs of the neighborhood of a warmer world, and the first forests of constant verdure. But here, also, a trifling elevation suffices to change the whole condition of its vicinity; thus a mountain like Athos bears on its heights nearly all European species of trees at once. And totally and utterly different is the natural condition of the interior. The Bay of Joannina, lying nearly a degree farther south than Naples, has the climate of Lombardy in the interior of Thessaly no olive tree will flourish, and the entire Pindus is a stranger to the flora of Southern Europe.

At the 39th degree, and not before, the warm air of sea and coast penetrates into the interior, where a rapid advance makes itself visible. Even in Phthiotis rice and cotton are already grown, and frequent specimens of the olive tree begin to occur. In Euboea and Attica there are even scattered instances of the palm tree, which in larger groups adorns the southern Cyclades,