Now the folk-tale stands not alone, in widowed solitariness, but is made to take its place in the great national, or perchance universal temple of song. We may say, therefore, that Homer not only gathered these Tales but organized them into a Whole, so that they no longer fall asunder into separate narratives, but they are deftly interwoven and form a great cycle of experience. No segment of this cycle can be taken away without breaking the totality. Moreover the entire series is but an organic part of the Odyssey. It is now manifest that those who resolve these Tales into a disconnected bead-roll have really fallen back into the second stage before mentioned; they have undone the work of Homer. If these four Books be simply a string of stories without an inner movement from one to the other, or without any organic connection with the rest of the poem, the entire poetic temple is but a pile of stones and no edifice. And this is what Wolf and his disciples make out of Homer. In one way or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. A school more recent than that of Wolf, the Comparative Philologists, have gone still further backwards, and have reduced Homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. The merit of both schools is that they have called attention to Homer's primitive materials; they have rendered impossible the idea that Homer created the Greek Gods or his mythology, or even his little stories. The defect of these schools is that they fail to see the architectonic Homer, the poet who builds the crude materials furnished by his people into an enduring structure of the noblest art. They recognize in the edifice the stone and also the stone-cutter, but no master-builder. Homer, therefore, is not merely the editor, collector, redactor; he is not a Grimm, gathering his tales from the mouths of the people with a scientific accuracy. He gathered them, doubtless, but he transfigured them into an image reflecting the experience of a human soul. Our age is indeed scientific, it is collecting the folk-songs and the folk-tales from every quarter of the globe, and stringing them on a thread, like so many beads, not being able to transmute them into poetry. Wolf heralded the coming time by starting to reconvert Homer into his primitive materials, by making him scientific and not poetic, at least not architectonic. Still we may be permitted to hope that these vast collections of the world's folk-lore will yet be transmuted by some new Homer into a world-poem.