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.”

To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less than Pallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth—­and wash the clothes. {72}

   “Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear
   Child so forgetful?  This long time doth rest,
   Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair. 
   Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest,
   And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best. 
   These are the things whence good repute is born,
   And praises that make glad a parent’s breast. 
   Come, let us both go washing with the morn;
   So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.

   “Know that thy maidenhood is not for long,
   Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo,
   Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung. 
   Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew,
   For wain and mules thy noble father sue,
   Which to the place of washing shall convey
   Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue. 
   This for thyself were better than essay
   Thither to walk:  the place is distant a long way.”

Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents—­