We hope the reader feels how inadequate Hades would be, and how incomplete the experience of Ulysses would be, if this last division of the Book were cut out. The wanderer has now gone through the total cycle of the Underworld, not only outwardly, but inwardly; he is just ready to step out of it, because he is beyond it in spirit. This last step is now to be given in Homeric fashion. There is a danger at present rising strongly into consciousness, a danger inherent in this too-long contemplation of Hades; it is the danger of the Gorgon, the monster whose view turns the spectator into stone, taking away all sensation, emotion, life. The Greek sooner or later must quit Hades, and flee from its shapes; the supersensible world he must transfuse into the sensible, else the former will rush over into the fantastic, the horrible, the ugly. The Gorgon is down in Hades too, having been slain in the terrestrial Upperworld by a Greek Hero, Perseus, who slew the monster of the Orient which once guarded the fair Andromeda, a kind of Pre-Trojan Helen, chained in captivity, whom the heroic Hellenic soul came to release. Ulysses has now reached the Greek limit, Oriental phantasms will rise unless there be a speedy return to the reality, to the realm of sense. Hades has furnished its highest image in Hercules, beware of its worst. Already the Underworld has been in danger of running into the fantastic; then Beauty, the Hellenic ideal, would be lost. The figures of Homeric Hades hitherto have all been men and women, but the monsters are ready to come forth. So they did come forth in the later Greek world under the spur of Oriental influence; witness the Revelations of St. John in the Island of Patmos, joint product of Greek and Hebrew spirit, showing truly the dissolution of the Hellenic ideal. Thus Ulysses, the supreme spiritual Hero of the Greeks, is shown running away from the Underworld, fearing to look upon coming shapes in Hades; about which fact two reflections can be made: first, Ulysses had to do this in order to remain a Greek; secondly, the poet clearly announces, in such an action, that there is another world lying beyond his world, that underneath the Greek Hades is another Hades, which threatens to rise into view. That Hades will burst up hereafter and become the Christian Hell. Ulysses confesses that there is a realm beyond him there, which he has not conquered, has not even dared to see, and thus he significantly points to the future. The Gorgon is a shadowy anticipation of fiends, of devils, of the infernal monsters of the Romantic Netherworld of Dante, who is to be the next great Hero, passing into the dark world beyond with a new light. To be sure, Virgil sends AEneas into Orcus, and makes such descent a Book of his poem, but Virgil too speaks of a realm beyond his Orcus, which his Hero does not enter. Thus the Roman poet shows substantially the same limits as the Greek poet, whom he has for the most part copied.