affections.[1] But he masters his emotion, for this is no time to betray himself, and follows Eumæus through the entrance-doors. It is poor Argus's last effort, and the old hound turns and dies—
"Just having seen Odysseus in the twentieth year."
The story is told by the Greek poet with somewhat more prolixity of detail than suits our modern notions of the pathetic, but the pathos of the incident itself is of the simplest and purest kind.
In beggar's guise Ulysses enters his own hall, and makes his rounds of the party who sit there at table, soliciting some contribution of broken meat to his wallet. None is so hard of heart as to refuse, except Antinous. In vain does Ulysses compliment him on his princely beauty, and remind him of the uncertainty of fortune, as evidenced by his own present case:—
And I had riches and a noble name,
And to the wandering poor still gave, whoever came."
I held, which God doth on the great bestow—
All that the ownership of large wealth brings.
But Zeus the Thunderer, for he willed it so,
Emptied my power, and sent a wave of woe."
Antinous haughtily bids him stand off, and when Ulysses expresses his wonder that in so fair a body
- ↑ When Adam Bede speaks roughly to his mother, and then tenderly to his dog Gyp, the author thus moralises on his inconsistency: "We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?"
