treats the comrades of Odysseus: "She drew them in and set them on benches and on chairs, and put before them cheese and meat and yellow honey, mixing therewith Pramnian wine; but with the food she mingled baleful drugs, to make them quite forget their fatherland. But when she had given them thereof and they had drunk, straightway she smote them with a rod and shut them up in sties. Of swine they had the head, the voice, the form, the bristles; but their mind stayed firm as it had been before. So they then were penned up, weeping bitter tears; but Circe threw before them acorns of the oak and ilex and cornel-berries, food that the forest-ranging swine are wont to eat." What is admirable in this description is its gravity. Circe is not made out particularly wicked or malignant. She is acting only after her kind, like some beautiful but baleful plant--a wreath, for instance, of red briony-berries, whereof if children eat, they perish. Nor, again, is there a touch of the burlesque in the narration. Therefore, in the charming picture which Rivière has painted of Circe, we trace a vein of modern feeling. Clasping her knees with girlish glee, she sits upon the ground beneath a tangle of wild-vine, and watches the clumsy hogs that tumble with half-comic, half-pathetic humanity expressed in their pink eyes and grunting snouts before her. So, too, the solemn picture by Burne Jones, a masterpiece of coloring, adds something mediæval to the Homeric Circe. The tall sunflowers that remind us of her father, the cringing panthers, black and lithe, the bending figure of the saffron-vested witch, the jars of potent juices, and the distant glimpse of sea and shore, suggest more of malignant intention than belongs to the #potnia Kirkê#, the #Kirkê polypharmakos# of Homer's tale. It was inevitable that modern art should infuse a deeper meaning into the allegory. The world has lived long and suffered much and grown greatly since the age of Homer. We cannot be so _naïf_ and childlike any longer. Yet the true charm of Circe in the _Odyssey_, the spirit that distinguishes her from Tannhaüser's Venus and Orlando's Fata Morgana and Ruggiero's Alcina and Tancred's Armida, lies just in this, that the poet has passed so lightly over all the dark and perilous places of his subject. This delicacy of touch can never be regained by art. It belonged to the conditions of the first Hellenic bloom of fancy, to suggest without insistance and to realize without emphasis. Impatient readers may complain of want of depth and character. They would fain see the Circe of the _Odyssey_ as strongly moralized as the Medea of Euripides. But in Homer only what is human attains to real intensity. The marvellous falls off and shades away into soft air-tints and delightful dreams. Still, it requires the interposition of the gods to save Odysseus from the charms of the malicious maid. As Hermes came to Priam on the path between Troy town and the Achaian ships, so now he meets the hero: