Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/59

Rh and Captain Crosstree. The hero's introduction to his new hosts presents, nevertheless, one of the most beautiful scenes in the poem. The patriarchal simplicity of the tale cannot fail to remind the reader, as Homer so often does, of the narratives of the earlier Scriptures.

The princess Nausicaa, daughter of the king of the Phæacians, has had a dream. The dream—which comes as naturally to princesses, no doubt, as to other young people—is of marriage; and in this case it could be no possible reproach to the dreamer, since the goddess of wisdom is represented as having herself suggested it. Nor is the dream of any bridegroom in particular, but simply of what seems to us the very prosaic fact that a wedding outfit, which must soon come to be thought of, required household stores of good linen; and that the family stock in the palace, from long disuse, stood much in need of washing. Nausicaa awakes in the morning, and begs of her father to lend her a chariot and a yoke of mules, that she and her maidens may go down to the shore, where the river joins the sea, to perform this domestic duty. The pastoral simplicity of the whole scene is charming. It has all the freshness, of those earlier ages when the business of life was so leisurely and jovially conducted, that much of it wore the features of a holiday. The princess and her maidens plunge the linen in the stream, and stamp it clean with their pretty bare feet (a process which will remind an English reader of Arlette and Robert of Normandy, and which may be seen in operation still at many a burn-side in Scotland), and then go