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ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS.
77
"All the day long the silvery foam we clave,
Wind in the well-stretched canvas following free,
Till the sun stooped beneath the western wave,
And darkness veiled the spaces of the sea.
Then to the limitary land came we
Of the sea-river, streaming deep, where dwell,
Shrouded in mist and gloom continually,
That people, from sweet light secluded well,
The dark Cimmerian tribe, who skirt the realms of hell."
Wind in the well-stretched canvas following free,
Till the sun stooped beneath the western wave,
And darkness veiled the spaces of the sea.
Then to the limitary land came we
Of the sea-river, streaming deep, where dwell,
Shrouded in mist and gloom continually,
That people, from sweet light secluded well,
The dark Cimmerian tribe, who skirt the realms of hell."
Who these Cimmerians were is not easily discoverable. Their name was held by the Greeks a synonym for all that was dark and barbarous in the mists of antiquity. It appears, nevertheless, in the earlier historians as the appellation of a real people; some rash ethnologists, tempted chiefly by the similarity of name, have tried to identify them with the Cymry—the early settlers of Wales. The Welsh are notoriously proud of their ancient origin, but it is doubtful how far they would accept the poet's description of their ancestral darkness, or the neighbourhood to which he here assigns them.
