On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer John Keats
The Strayed Reveller Matthew Arnold
The Wine of Circe Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Tanglewood Tales (Circe’s Palace) Nathaniel Hawthorne
Greek Story and Song, pp. 214-225 A.J.  Church
The Odyssey, pp. 151-164 (School Ed.) G.H.  Palmer (Trans.)
Classic Myths, chapter 24 C.M.  Gayley
The Age of Fable, p. 295 Thomas Bulfinch
The Prayer of the Swine to Circe Austin Dobson

PICTURES

The Wine of Circe                       Sir Edward Burne-Jones
Circe and the Companions of Ulysses     Briton Riviere

THE PROMISED LAND

MARY ANTIN

(From Chapter IX of The Promised Land)

During his three years of probation, my father had made a number of false starts in business.  His history for that period is the history of thousands who come to America, like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in their native land.  Dozens of these men pass under your eyes every day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the repugnance with which you shrink from their touch.  You see them shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons, or bending over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor shop, or rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at the command of the burly policeman.  “The Jew peddler!” you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming that the sordid drama of his days may have a moral that concerns you.  What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom his citizenship papers?  What if the cross-legged tailor is supporting a boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitution for you?  What if the ragpicker’s daughters are hastening over the ocean to teach your children in the public schools?  Think, every time you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was born thousands of years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a common language.  Remember that his very physiognomy is a cipher the key to which it behooves you to search for most diligently.

* * * * *

By the time we joined my father, he had surveyed many avenues of approach toward the coveted citadel of fortune.  One of these, heretofore untried, he now proposed to essay, armed with new courage, and cheered on by the presence of his family.  In partnership with an energetic little man who had an English chapter in his history, he prepared to set up a refreshment booth on Crescent Beach.  But while he was completing arrangements at the beach, we remained in town, where we enjoyed the educational advantages of a thickly populated neighborhood; namely, Wall Street, in the West End of Boston.