Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/21

Rh question of age has been unanimously voted impertinent by all her modern admirers: she still shines in our fancy with

which the Laureate saw in his 'Dream of Fair Women.' The heroic legends take no count of years. Woman is there beautiful by divine right of sex, unless in those few special instances in which, for the purposes of the story, particular persons are necessarily represented as old and decrepit. Nor is there any ground for supposing that the suitors of Penelope, like the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, persisted in attributing to her fictitious charms. She is evidently not less beautiful in the poet's eyes than in theirs. As beauty has been happily said to be, after all, "the lover's gift," so also the bestowal of it upon whom he will must be allowed to be the privilege of the poet. The island-queen herself says, indeed, that her beauty had fled when Ulysses left her, and could only be restored by his return ; but this disclaimer from the lips of a loving and mourning wife only makes her more charming, and she is not the only woman, ancient or modern, who has borrowed an additional fascination from her tears.

The suitors of Penelope, strange to say, are living at free quarters in the palace of the absent Ulysses. Telemachus is too young, apparently, to assert his rights as master of the house on his own or his mother's behalf. If the picture be true to the life—and there is no good reason to suppose it otherwise—