Page:Homer The Iliad.djvu/50

36 and so interesting—he cries to his mother. True, that mother is, as we remember, a goddess—Thetis, daughter of the great Jupiter, and of potent influence in the waters beneath the earth. To her he bemoans himself. That his days were to be few, he knew when he came here to Troy; but she had promised him undying renown. It has failed him: his “one crowded hour of glorious life” is darkened in dishonour. He cries, and his goddess-mother hears him—

It is the original of our own Milton’s beautiful invocation in Comus—the rough simple outline on which he has painted with a grace and fulness which make it all his own—

Thetis hears, and rises on the sea—“like as it were a mist”—(the “White Lady of Avenel”) caresses him soothingly with her hand, as though the stalwart warrior were still a child indeed, and asks him the simple question which all mothers, goddesses or not, would put into much the same words—“My son, why weepest thou?” He tells his tale of wrong; and she proceeds to give him, in the first place, advice certainly not wiser than that of some earthly mothers. She does not advise him to make up his quarrel with