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24 usual resort, it will be remarked, of the Homeric heroes, when they seek to calm the tumult of grief or anger. Such appeal to the soothing influence of what Homer calls the "illimitable" ocean is not less true to nature than it is characteristic of the poetical and imaginative temperament. Bathing his hands in the sea waves—for prayer, to the Greek as to the Hebrew mind, demanded a preparatory purification—Telemachus lifts his cry to his guardian goddess, Minerva. At once she stands before him there in the likeness of Mentor. She speaks to him words of encouragement and counsel. Evil men may mock at him now; but if he be determined to prove himself the true son of such a father, he shall not lack honour in the end. She will provide him ship and crew for his voyage. Thus encouraged by the divine Wisdom which speaks in the person of Mentor, he returns to the banquet-hall, to avoid suspicion. Yet, when Antinous greets him there with a mocking show of friendship, he wrenches his hand roughly from his grasp, and quits the company. Taking into his counsels his nurse Eurycleia—who is the palace housekeeper also—he bids her make ready good store of provisions for his voyage: twelve capacious vessels filled with the ripest wine, twenty measures of fine meal, and grain besides, carefully sewn up in wallets. In the dusk of this very evening, unknown to his mother, he will embark; for the goddess (still in Mentor's likeness) has chartered for him a galley with twenty stout rowers, which is to lie ready launched for him in the harbour at nightfall. Eurycleia vainly remonstrates with her nursling on his dangerous purpose—