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McDuffie's light burning, and hear his sonorous voice as he read aloud some English masterpiece. I am afraid we do not allow our students time for that

now.

In Harvard and Yale, with the exhaustive preparation they can and do require for admission, the elective studies, in the higher classes particularly, seem to solve the problem in great measure. But with us, where wretched preparation is the rule, election is never safe before the third or fourth year, if then. It seems to me the only plan is for the better colleges in the South to have and rigidly enforce certain fixed requirements for admission; then to have two or more parallel courses, as circumstances allow, with fewer studies in each course, and more time given to each; and finally, in the third and fourth years, if possible, some elective studies.

After this jeremiad there is space only for the mention of a few of the hopeful signs in Southern educational work. I take hope from the fact that the South is more generally aroused on the subject of education than ever before, that primary education is more generally diffused. The effect will be seen in time. Young men who aspire to professorships are beginning to fit themselves for the higher work in a manner not known before. The unwritten law of good Northern colleges that a young man must have first-class university training, at home or abroad, if he hopes to rise, is

being established among us, too. Eleven graduates of recent years of a college in South Carolina, which has really not more than one hundred names on its rolls, are now pursuing, or propose to pursue, a university course either in this country or abroad. With two or three exceptions, these young men are seeking not professional training, but simply. higher culture. Best of all, two thirds of them are making the money necessary for the course they propose. There was an increase in the incomes reported by Southern colleges from 1880 to 1881 of $109,330. The idea that colleges must be endowed is gaining ground. There is a growing conviction that fitting-schools of a high order are as necessary as colleges. We do not yet, however, appreciate the truth that preparatory schools, in order to good work and permanence, must be endowed. Two facts have given me more encouragement than anything else. Culleoka, recognized as the best fitting-school in Tennessee, is every year crowded with students from all parts of the South, and sometimes rejects in one year applicants enough to fill another school. The other fact is the founding and endowing, a few years ago, of the Holy Communion Institute, a good academy, in Charleston, South Carolina. have probably touched the lowest point, and those of us who are young will see better things in the "New South" than our fathers ever saw.

We

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green leaf folded in its embrace. In an instant the creature was gone, with a mellow touch of the "flying harp." At that moment the whole visible world seemed to pertain to the ingenious bee: I had been singularly favored that I had seen the insect at all, and a glimpse of the queen of fays and her "little team of atomies" could scarcely have surprised or pleased me more. How ever, I began to regret that I had not seen the leaf- cutter plying her keenedged scissors, and to wish that I might find where she went with her plunder. I examined the leaves of the rose bush, and was surprised to notice how many of them had been subjected to the scissors. The snipping had been done in two patterns, deep, nearly circular scallops, and oblong segments with the corners rounded. The edges were left quite smooth, from which it was evident that the operant was no crude prentice hand.

After this chance introduction to the leaf-cutter (who I found bore the burdensome name Megachile), I watched the ways of my distinguished new acquaintance, and made sundry attempts to trace her from the rosebush to the laboratory in which she worked up the raw material of the leaves this, I fancied, would be either an excavation in old wood or a burrow underground; it proved, in the case of my acquaintance, to be neither of these.

My quest met with no success, until, one day in the vegetable garden, I observed a thick-set, dusky bee, with narrow yellow bands, entering the hollow of an onion top, two or three inches of which had been cut off. No wonder my curiosity ran high: could this be the residence of the aristocratic leaf-cutter? Could it be, that one whom I had mentally associated with Titania herself should have no finer perception of elegant congruity than to set up housekeeping within walls of garlic, bringing thereto rose-leaf appointments? If so,

I thought it would be no slander to report the hymenopterous tribe as deficient in the sense of smell. I waited for the bee to come out, which she presently did, and then peeped into the onion top, where I discovered a cell in process of construction. As there were other cut or broken tops, I examined those also, and found several that were similarly occupied.

Some stalks contained one, others two cylindrical cells about an inch long, the sides formed by overlapping oblong bits of rose-leaves, while the top and bottom were closed with circular pieces, the whole structure held together as though it had been pressed in a mould. The inner layers were united by means of a substance that acted as cement. Afterward, when I compared the pieces of which these cells were composed with the notches in the rose-leaves, it seemed not impossible that, with time and patience, the cut-out portions might be fitted in their original places. In some cases, as I split the onion stalk, the bee was still at work storing bee-bread for the support of her offspring, and could not be induced to leave until all but the inner walls of her laboratory had been torn away. Some cells were already closed, and within was the large waxenlooking larva, feeding on the provision laid up by its solicitous parent, its appetite unimpaired by the garlicky character of the flavoring.

I have yet to learn that a community of leaf-cutters (in an onion bed, too!) is a matter of ordinary occurrence; certainly, it will cause me some surprise if the novelty should be repeated another season. To speak of a community of solitary bees would be to speak in paradox, and it should be added that these insects, though occupying the same neighborhood, apparently exchanged no social civilities. I remember to have questioned one of these independents very closely on the subject, to have questioned and to have been answered in some such way as the following:—

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WHILE Mr. W. J. Stillman is cruising among the isles of Greece to detect the actual route of Ulysses or Odysseus, an American professor has published a book1 which leaves us no excuse for not exploring the original narrative of that hero's adventures. Bearing on alternate pages a sumptuous reprint of Homer's Odyssey and a charming translation, the volume offers at once a treat to the eyes and an invitation into the still air of delightful studies. It surely should have appeared earlier in the season, for it is emphatically a summer book, deserving indeed to head one of those lists entitled For Summer Travel with which all enterprising publishers delight to greet what has this year scarcely been the warmer season. The much-wandering Odysseus is in reality the very chief and type of all itinerants; nobody ever went so far within a small space; he was like Thoreau, who "had traveled a great deal in Concord." Nobody else ever extracted so much voyaging out of a limited sheet of water, nobody else ever stayed so long from home in order to do this, nor did any one else ever put his wife and son to so much trouble to find him. What are the trivial wanderings of Father Æneas to the two days' swim of Homer's hero; what was Dido for an enchantress, beside Kalypso? What eminent society, famous in the romantic records of all time, did this experienced

1 The Odyssey of Homer. Books I.-XII. The Text, and an English Version in Rhythmic Prose. By GEORGE HERBERT PALMER, Professor of

traveler encounter; sometimes conversing with gods or sailing with goddesses, and happening in as a stranger guest upon the restored domesticity of Menelaus and Helen. That traditional beauty of all the world, divine among women, δια γυναικῶν, did not indeed make him immortal with a kiss, as Marlowe's Faustus demanded; but she was for him the stately and gracious hostess she bade her maids lay beautiful purple rugs for his couch; and she poured into his wine a drug, known to her only, that quenched pain and strife, and brought forgetfulness of every ill. "He who should taste it, when mixed in the bowl, would not that day let tears fall down his cheeks, although his mother and father died, although before his door a brother or dear son were cut off by the sword and his own eyes beheld." What hostess of these days, whether at Newport, or the Isle of Wight, or Trouville, has such a beverage to offer?

This is the book which we have, one might almost say, for the first time in English, at the hands of Mr. Palmer. Not that it has not been more than twenty times rendered into our language, but it was reserved for Mr. Palmer to hit upon a mode of translation so admirable that he succeeds in preserving, in Homer, for the first time, certain peculiar qualities that others have missed. All previous versions have been made either

Philosophy in Harvard University. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1884.

in verse, or in that other form of language which Molière's hero had spoken all his life without being aware of it. It was reserved for the present translator to hit upon a sort of rhythmic prose, constructed in loose iambics, which are sufficiently veiled to be unobtrusive, yet distinct enough to be effective; thus giving us, just as Homer supplies it, narrative and poetry in one. This mode of rendering was first tested in public readings at Harvard College, and most successfully; the exercises took place in the evening and were wholly voluntary, yet the attendance was large and the enthusiasm great. The general testimony was, both among the undergraduates and on the part of the general public, that they felt for the first time the real charm of Homer, when Mr. Palmer, seemingly in the most off-hand and colloquial manner, gave this fresh version of the immortal song.

Whether the result thus achieved has gained or lost by the printing may be seriously questioned. Mr. Palmer himself says, in his ample and admirable preface, "I cannot expect that methods originally fitted to the ear will be equally well-suited to the eye" (page xiii.). It is possible, as he further suggests, that many who enjoyed the reading may have failed to recognize the covert rhythm, although they felt its influence. The careful scholarship of the book is best tested by the eye, no doubt; but the eye is more critical than the ear as to this new experiment in prose metres. Take, for instance, the two lines describing the grief of Penelope.

Τόσσα μιν ὁρμαίνουσαν ἐπήλυθε νήδυμος ύπνος . εἶδε δ ̓ ἀνακλινθεῖσα, λύθεν δέ οἱ ἄψεα πάντα. (IV. 793-4.) Mr. Palmer renders this, the marks of supposed quantity being our own: "To her in such anxiety sweet slumber came ǎnd lying back shě slēpt and every jōint relaxed." Here the alternate short and long syllables evidently require a little. forcing from the voice, but with that aid

the hearer would not criticise, though the reader might. Again, the close following of the Greek arrangement of words, as attempted by Mr. Palmer, leads to a frequent inversion, which was charming when given as colloquial, but seems sometimes constraiped in print. Once more, the demand of the rhythm leads occasionally to the insertion of undue particles in English, or to a slight stretching of the Greek particles; and this is more readily recognized by eye than by ear. Sometimes Mr. Palmer vibrates too visibly between a statelier and a more familiar vocabulary, according to the same rhythmic necessities. We can perfectly understand, therefore, in view of all these considerations that some of the more technical Grecians at Harvard College should have questioned these performances, as they would perhaps have questioned Homer's own, had they heard them; yet, after all, their loss is the world's gain; the rhythmic version gives a sense of wholly new enjoyment, and the result is, that Mr. Palmer has, to our thinking, come nearer the soul and spirit of the Odyssey than any translator before him. Whether his method would apply as well to the sterner strain of the Iliad may well be doubted; but he must be judged by what he attempts.

The story of Odysseus takes us back in many respects to the childhood of the world; but instead of finding there only grossness and rudeness, we see rather a dignified propriety of moral standard, a fine courtesy of manners, and a respectful and even refined treatment of women. Nothing can be more marked in this respect than the picture of the domestic attitude of Helen, as already mentioned; she moves among her household still a queen, and the recognized equal of her husband within the domain of home. The same is the case with the princess Nausikaä, the white-armed, Ναυσικάα λευκώλενον, who, although she goes with her maidens to the riverside

to wash clothes, yet rides in her father's best carriage, and plays ball, possibly lawn-tennis, when the work is done. The book is full of delicate touches of home life and high-bred courtesy, joined, it must be owned, with very hard hitting when the fight comes on. Homer is in truth as simple and straightforward in his blood-letting as in his love-making or his hospitality; and the tortures inflicted by the red Indians are hardly worse than the manner in which Ulysses and his son Telemachus handle the offending suitors and erring maidens when the wanderer comes back to his own. Mr. Palmer's version discreetly stops short before this carnival of vengeance, for he gives us only the first twelve books.

There is nothing finer, either in the original or in the translation, than when, at the beginning of the eleventh book, Odysseus visits the realm of the dead. Hardly less powerful than Dante's vision, it is less grim; and it makes Virgil's similar adventures seem remote and merely literary. "Then gathered there spirits from out of Erebos of those now dead and gone, brides, and unwedded youths, and worn old men, delicate maids with hearts but new to sorrow, and many pierced with brazen spears, men slain in fight, wearing their bloodstained armor. In crowds around the pit they flocked from every side, with awful wail." (XI. 36-40.) Then follows a vision of fair women like Tennyson's; and at last comes the king of

men.

"When then chaste Persephonê had scattered here and there those spirits of tender women, there came the spirit of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, sorrowing. Around thronged other spirits of such as by his side had died at the house of Aigisthos, and there had met their doom. He knew me as soon as he had tasted the dark blood; and then he wailed aloud and let the big tears fall, and stretched his hands forth eagerly to grasp me. But no, there VOL. LIV. — - NO. 324.

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was no strength or vigor left, such as was once within his supple limbs. I wept to see, and pitied him from my heart." (XI. 386–95.) This is one of the few passages in the Odyssey where Homer gives us a softened, or, as we might say, a modern strain; and we may indeed feel that the whole twelve books here translated do not together equal in depth of tenderness the two untranslated Greek hexameters in which Mr. Palmer inscribes the work to the memory of his own wife. After all, something has been gained since the days of the glory that was Greece.

It is hardly to be expected that a rhythmical translation, even in prose, should be as literal as one free from all such effort; yet after the comparison of many pages with the original, we should say that, even in the precision of single phrases, Palmer surpasses the translation of Butcher and Lang, his only real competitors. When, for instance, in the opening lines he renders raípov by "his men," it is more literal as well as more vigorous than the phrase "his company," twice used by Butcher and Lang. For the Greek word is plural, not a mere noun of multitude, and it is closely followed by a plural pronoun referring to the same party; and though it might be claimed that it carries a meaning of comradeship which is better represented by the word "company," yet the constant use in army and navy of "his men" or "my men," in the sense of subordinate companions, renders that word equally applicable as well as more terse. Again, in the early lines, the Homeric phrase νύμφη πότνι' (Ι. 14) is rather inadequately rendered by "ladynymph," in Butcher and Lang, while the statelier phrase "potent nymph" of Palmer is more satisfying. In the same line Kalypso is also called dia Ocάwv, and this the English translators render lightly as "fair goddess," while Palmer's "heavenly goddess" is surely better. This suggests a rather amusing

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