Various - Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools

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Perhaps you will like to tell the story of Ulysses's arrival among the
Phaeacians, giving it a modern setting, and using modern names.

=Odysseus at the House of Alcinoues=:--Without reading Book VII of the
_Odyssey_, write what you imagine to be the conversation between
Alcinoues (or Arete) and Odysseus, when the shipwrecked hero enters the
palace.

COLLATERAL READINGS

The Odyssey George Herbert Palmer (Trans.)
The Odyssey of Homer (prose translation) Butcher and Lang
The Iliad of Homer Lang, Leaf, and Myers
The Odyssey (translation in verse) William Cullen Bryant
The Odyssey for Boys and Girls A.J. Church
The Story of the Odyssey " " "
Greek Song and Story " " "
The Adventures of Odysseus Marvin, Mayor, and Stawell
Tanglewood Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne
Home Life of the Ancient Greeks H. Bluemner (trans, by A.
Zimmerman
Classic Myths (chapter 27) C.M. Gayley
The Age of Fable (chapters 22 and 23) Thomas Bulfinch
The Story of the Greek People Eva March Tappan
Greece and the Aegean Isles Philip S. Marden
Greek Lands and Letters F.G. and A.C.E. Allinson
Old Greek Folk Stories J.P. Peabody
Men of Old Greece Jennie Hall
The Lotos-eaters Alfred Tennyson
Ulysses " "
The Strayed Reveller Matthew Arnold
A Song of Phaeacia Andrew Lang
The Voyagers (in _The Fields of Dawn_) Lloyd Mifflin
Alice Freeman Palmer George Herbert Palmer

See the references for _Moly_ on p. 84, and for Odysseus on p. 140.

ODYSSEUS

GEORGE CABOT LODGE

He strove with Gods and men in equal mood
Of great endurance: Not alone his hands
Wrought in wild seas and labored in strange lands,
And not alone his patient strength withstood
The clashing cliffs and Circe's perilous sands:
Eager of some imperishable good
He drave new pathways thro' the trackless flood
Foreguarded, fearless, free from Fate's commands.
How shall our faith discern the truth he sought?
We too must watch and wander till our eyes,
Turned skyward from the topmost tower of thought,
Haply shall find the star that marked his goal,
The watch-fire of transcendent liberties
Lighting the endless spaces of the soul.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

Read the poem through. How did Ulysses strive with gods and men? Why can
it be said that he did not labor alone? Look up the story of Circe and
her palace.[10] What was the imperishable good that Ulysses sought? What
does his experience have to do with our lives? What sort of freedom does
the author speak of in the last few lines?

This verse-form is called the sonnet. How many lines has it? Make out a
scheme of the rhymes: _a b b a_, etc. Notice the change of thought at
the ninth line. Do all sonnets show this change?

EXERCISES

Read several other sonnets; for instance, the poem _On the Life-Mask of
Abraham Lincoln_, on page 210, or _On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer_, by John Keats, or _The Grasshopper and the Cricket_, by Leigh
Hunt.

Notice how these other sonnets are constructed. Why are they considered
good?

If possible, read part of what is said about the sonnet in _English
Verse_, by R.M. Alden or in _Forms of English Poetry_, by C.F. Johnson,
or in _Melodies of English Verse_, by Lewis Kennedy Morse; notice some
of the examples given.

Look in the good magazines for examples of the sonnet.

COLLATERAL READINGS

To the Grasshopper and the Cricket Leigh Hunt
The Fish Answers (or, The Fish to the Man)[11] Leigh Hunt
On the Grasshopper and Cricket John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer John Keats
Ozymandias P.B. Shelley
The Sonnet R.W. Gilder
The Odyssey (sonnet) Andrew Lang
The Wine of Circe (sonnet) Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Automobile (sonnet)[12] Percy Mackaye
The Sonnet William Wordsworth

See also references for the _Odyssey_, p. 137, and for _Moly_, p. 84.

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

(In _Suburban Sketches_)

It was long past the twilight hour, which has been already mentioned as
so oppressive in suburban places, and it was even too late for visitors,
when a resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a contributor to the
magazines, was startled by a ring at his door. As any thoughtful person
would have done upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance in
his mind, speculating whether it were such or such a one, and dismissing
the whole list of improbabilities, before he laid down the book he was
reading and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he was rewarded
by the apparition of an utter stranger on his threshold,--a gaunt figure
of forlorn and curious smartness towering far above him, that jerked him
a nod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford lived there. The face which
the lamplight revealed was remarkable for a harsh two days' growth of
beard, and a single bloodshot eye; yet it was not otherwise a sinister
countenance, and there was something in the strange presence that
appealed and touched. The contributor, revolving the facts vaguely in
his mind, was not sure, after all, that it was not the man's clothes
rather than his expression that softened him toward the rugged visage:
they were so tragically cheap; and the misery of helpless needle-women,
and the poverty and ignorance of the purchaser, were so apparent in
their shabby newness, of which they appeared still conscious enough to
have led the way to the very window, in the Semitic quarter of the
city, where they had lain ticketed, "This nobby suit for $15."

But the stranger's manner put both his face and his clothes out of mind,
and claimed a deeper interest when, being answered that the person for
whom he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips hard
together, and sighed heavily.

"They told me," he said, in a hopeless way, "that he lived on this
street, and I've been to every other house. I'm very anxious to find
him, Cap'n,"--the contributor, of course, had no claim to the title with
which he was thus decorated,--"for I've a daughter living with him, and
I want to see her; I've just got home from a two years' voyage,
and"--there was a struggle of the Adam's-apple in the man's gaunt
throat--"I find she's about all there is left of my family."

How complex is every human motive! This contributor had been lately
thinking, whenever he turned the pages of some foolish traveller,--some
empty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where all sensation was
long ago exhausted, and the oxygen has perished from every sentiment, so
has it been breathed and breathed again,--that nowadays the wise
adventurer sat down beside his own register and waited for incidents to
seek him out. It seemed to him that the cultivation of a patient and
receptive spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the occurrence
of all manner of surprising facts within the range of one's own personal
knowledge; that not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies
and the genii, and all the people of romance, who had but to be
hospitably treated in order to develop the deepest interest of fiction,
and to become the characters of plots so ingenious that the most cunning
invention were poor beside them. I myself am not so confident of this,
and would rather trust Mr. Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any
chance combination of events. But I should be afraid to say how much his
pride in the character of the stranger's sorrows, as proof of the
correctness of his theory, prevailed with the contributor to ask him to
come in and sit down; though I hope that some abstract impulse of
humanity, some compassionate and unselfish care for the man's
misfortunes as misfortunes, was not wholly wanting. Indeed, the helpless
simplicity with which he had confided his case might have touched a
harder heart. "Thank you," said the poor fellow, after a moment's
hesitation. "I believe I will come in. I've been on foot all day, and
after such a long voyage it makes a man dreadfully sore to walk about so
much. Perhaps you can think of a Mr. Hapford living somewhere in the
neighborhood."

He sat down, and, after a pondering silence, in which he had remained
with his head fallen upon his breast, "My name is Jonathan Tinker," he
said, with the unaffected air which had already impressed the
contributor, and as if he felt that some form of introduction was
necessary, "and the girl that I want to find is Julia Tinker." Then he
added, resuming the eventful personal history which the listener
exulted, while he regretted, to hear: "You see, I shipped first to
Liverpool, and there I heard from my family; and then I shipped again
for Hong-Kong, and after that I never heard a word: I seemed to miss the
letters everywhere. This morning, at four o'clock, I left my ship as
soon as she had hauled into the dock, and hurried up home. The house
was shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn't know what to do, and I sat
down on the doorstep to wait till the neighbors woke up, to ask them
what had become of my family. And the first one come out he told me my
wife had been dead a year and a half, and the baby I'd never seen, with
her; and one of my boys was dead; and he didn't know where the rest of
the children was, but he'd heard two of the little ones was with a
family in the city."

The man mentioned these things with the half-apologetical air observable
in a certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to
confess the infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your
sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of
having it thrown back upon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk
so far as to say, "Pretty rough!" when the stranger paused; and perhaps
these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart. The man's
quivering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark
face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn
cheeks. This demonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to
stand for the passion of tears into which the emotional races fall at
such times. He opened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on:--

"I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found the
children. I'd been gone so long they didn't know me, and somehow I
thought the people they were with weren't over-glad I'd turned up.
Finally the oldest child told me that Julia was living with a Mr.
Hapford on this street, and I started out here to-night to look her up.
If I can find her, I'm all right. I can get the family together, then,
and start new."

"It seems rather odd," mused the listener aloud, "that the neighbors let
them break up so, and that they should all scatter as they did."

"Well, it ain't so curious as it seems, Cap'n. There was money for them
at the owners', all the time; I'd left part of my wages when I sailed;
but they didn't know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of
children do? Julia's a good girl, and when I find her I'm all right."

The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on
that street, and never had been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be
such a person in the neighborhood: and they would go out together and
ask at some of the houses about. But the stranger must first take a
glass of wine; for he looked used up.

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want
to give so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his
lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, "I hope I
may have the opportunity of returning the compliment." The contributor
thanked him; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case,
and considered the cost at which the stranger had come to enjoy his
politeness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of the
compliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of another
set phrase, "Not at all." But the thought had made him the more anxious
to befriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the
two sallied out together, and rang doorbells wherever lights were still
seen burning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who
answered their summons whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the
neighborhood.

And although the search for this gentleman proved vain, the contributor
could not feel that an expedition which set familiar objects in such
novel lights was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately into the
cares and anxieties of his protege that at times he felt himself in some
inexplicable sort a shipmate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally a
partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all things which takes
place, within doors and without, about midnight may have helped to cast
this doubt upon his identity;--he seemed to be visiting now for the
first time the streets and neighborhoods nearest his own, and his feet
stumbled over the accustomed walks. In his quality of houseless
wanderer, and--so far as appeared to others--possibly worthless
vagabond, he also got a new and instructive effect upon the faces which,
in his real character, he knew so well by their looks of neighborly
greeting; and it is his belief that the first hospitable prompting of
the human heart is to shut the door in the eyes of homeless strangers
who present themselves after eleven o'clock. By that time the servants
are all abed, and the gentleman of the house answers the bell, and looks
out with a loath and bewildered face, which gradually changes to one of
suspicion, and of wonder as to what those fellows can possibly want of
_him_, till at last the prevailing expression is one of contrite desire
to atone for the first reluctance by any sort of service. The
contributor professes to have observed these changing phases in the
visages of those whom he that night called from their dreams, or
arrested in the act of going to bed; and he drew the conclusion--very
proper for his imaginable connection with the garroting and other
adventurous brotherhoods--that the most flattering moment for knocking
on the head people who answer a late ring at night is either in their
first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-abandonment to their
better impulses. It does not seem to have occurred to him that he would
himself have been a much more favorable subject for the predatory arts
than any of his neighbors, if his shipmate, the unknown companion of his
researches for Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the faith of
the gaunt giant upon which he reposed was good, and the contributor
continued to wander about with him in perfect safety. Not a soul among
those they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford,--far less of a Julia
Tinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor's
explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth,--briefly
told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at
the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or,
in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow cast
there by the lamplight,--it was a story which could hardly fail to
awaken pity.

At last, after ringing several bells where there were no lights, in the
mere wantonness of good-will, and going away before they could be
answered (it would be entertaining to know what dreams they caused the
sleepers within), there seemed to be nothing for it but to give up the
search till morning, and go to the main street and wait for the last
horse-car to the city.

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan Tinker, being plied with a
few leading questions, told in hints and scraps the story of his hard
life, which was at present that of a second mate, and had been that of
a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the mast. The second mate's place he
held to be the hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars more than
the men, and you did not rank with the officers; you took your meals
alone, and in everything you belonged by yourself. The men did not
respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you awfully before the
passengers. The hardest captain that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with
was Captain Gooding of the Cape. It had got to be so that no man could
ship second mate under Captain Gooding; and Jonathan Tinker was with him
only one voyage. When he had been home awhile, he saw an advertisement
for a second mate, and he went round to the owners'. They had kept it
secret who the captain was; but there was Captain Gooding in the owners'
office. "Why, here's the man, now, that I want for a second mate," said
he, when Jonathan Tinker entered; "he knows me."--"Captain Gooding, I
know you 'most too well to want to sail under you," answered Jonathan.
"I might go if I hadn't been with you one voyage too many already."

"And then the men!" said Jonathan, "the men coming aboard drunk, and
having to be pounded sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on the
second mate! Why, there isn't an inch of me that hasn't been cut over or
smashed into a jell. I've had three ribs broken; I've got a scar from a
knife on my cheek; and I've been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times,
to lay me up."

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much
misery and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing.
"Well, what can you do?" he went on. "If you don't strike, the men think
you're afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard. I
always tell a man, 'Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way I
mean to keep on. You do your duty and you're all right. But if you
don't'--Well, the men ain't Americans any more,--Dutch, Spaniards,
Chinese, Portuguee, and it ain't like abusing a white man."

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible tyranny which we all
know exists on shipboard; and his listener respected him the more that,
though he had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too honest not to
own it.

Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did not know what else to
do. When he was younger, he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet
there was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be captain. He
used to hope for that once, but not now; though he _thought_ he could
navigate a ship. Only let him get his family together again, and he
would--yes, he would--try to do something ashore.

No car had yet come in sight, and so the contributor suggested that they
should walk to the car-office, and look in the "Directory," which is
kept there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it had already
been arranged that they should renew their acquaintance on the morrow.
Jonathan Tinker, when they had reached the office, heard with
constitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford for whom he inquired
was not in the "Directory." "Never mind," said the other; "come round to
my house in the morning. We'll find him yet." So they parted with a
shake of the hand, the second mate saying that he believed he should go
down to the vessel and sleep aboard,--if he could sleep,--and murmuring
at the last moment the hope of returning the compliment, while the
other walked homeward, weary as to the flesh, but, in spite of his
sympathy for Jonathan Tinker, very elate in spirit. The truth is,--and
however disgraceful to human nature, let the truth still be told,--he
had recurred to his primal satisfaction in the man as calamity capable
of being used for such and such literary ends, and, while he pitied him,
rejoiced in him as an episode of real life quite as striking and
complete as anything in fiction. It was literature made to his hand.
Nothing could be better, he mused; and once more he passed the details
of the story in review, and beheld all those pictures which the poor
fellow's artless words had so vividly conjured up: he saw him leaping
ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled into the dock,
and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to the
pavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined the
tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's home must have
caused in him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf to
all his appeals; he saw him sitting down upon what had been his own
threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered patience till the
neighbors should be awake, while the noises of the streets gradually
arose, and the wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk-man
and the ice-man came and went, and the waiting figure began to be stared
at, and to challenge the curiosity of the passing policeman; he fancied
the opening of the neighbor's door, and the slow, cold understanding of
the case; the manner, whatever it was, in which the sailor was told that
one year before his wife had died, with her babe, and that his children
were scattered, none knew where. As the contributor dwelt pityingly upon
these things, but at the same time estimated their aesthetic value one
by one, he drew near the head of his street, and found himself a few
paces behind a boy slouching onward through the night, to whom he called
out, adventurously, and with no real hope of information,--

"Do you happen to know anybody on this street by the name of Hapford?"

"Why, no, not in this town," said the boy; but he added that there was a
street of the same name in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a
Hapford living on it.

"By Jove!" thought the contributor, "this is more like literature than
ever"; and he hardly knew whether to be more provoked at his own
stupidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in the next
village, or delighted at the element of fatality which the fact
introduced into the story; for Tinker, according to his own account,
must have landed from the cars a few rods from the very door he was
seeking, and so walked farther and farther from it every moment. He
thought the case so curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy,
who, however he might have been inwardly affected, was sufficiently true
to the national traditions not to make the smallest conceivable outward
sign of concern in it.

At home, however, the contributor related his adventures and the story
of Tinker's life, adding the fact that he had just found out where Mr.
Hapford lived. "It was the only touch wanting," said he; "the whole
thing is now perfect."

"It's _too_ perfect," was answered from a sad enthusiasm. "Don't speak
of it! I can't take it in."

"But the question is," said the contributor, penitently taking himself
to task for forgetting the hero of these excellent misfortunes in his
delight at their perfection, "how am I to sleep to-night, thinking of
that poor soul's suspense and uncertainty? Never mind,--I'll be up
early, and run over and make sure that it is Tinker's Hapford, before he
gets out here, and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would it not be a
justifiable _coup de theatre_ to fetch his daughter here, and let her
answer his ring at the door when he comes in the morning?"

This plan was discouraged. "No, no; let them meet in their own way. Just
take him to Hapford's house and leave him."

"Very well. But he's too good a character to lose sight of. He's got to
come back here and tell us what he intends to do."

The birds, next morning, not having had the second mate on their minds
either as an unhappy man or a most fortunate episode, but having slept
long and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way in the wayside
trees; and the sweetness of their notes made the contributor's heart
light as he climbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford's door.

The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom he knew
at a glance for the second mate's daughter, but of whom, for form's
sake, he asked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living there.

"My name's Julia Tinker," answered the maid, who had rather a
disappointing face.

"Well," said the contributor, "your father's got back from his Hong-Kong
voyage."

"Hong-Kong voyage?" echoed the girl, with a stare of helpless inquiry,
but no other visible emotion.

"Yes. He had never heard of your mother's death. He came home yesterday
morning, and was looking for you all day."

Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute; and the other was puzzled
at the want of feeling shown, which he could not account for even as a
national trait. "Perhaps there's some mistake," he said.

"There must be," answered Julia: "my father hasn't been to sea for a
good many years. _My_ father," she added, with a diffidence
indescribably mingled with a sense of distinction,--"_my_ father 's in
State's Prison. What kind of looking man was this?"

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