Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to the common world of Greece--to beloved Ithaca. He has passed to the cave of Hel, and emerged from it to visit the land of Paradise; now he returns, that his adventures may be sung in the homes of Greece. How could men ever tell tales of that strange country, if it really were a shore from which no traveller returned? Accordingly, this traveller is laid to sleep in the black barque of the Phæaceans, "a sweet sleep, unwakeful, nearest like to death; and as arose the one brightest star to herald the morning, the sea-troubled ship touched the shore."[24] Thus end the adventures of the wanderer; and, as far as regards the belief concerning the sea of death, this is all his adventures can tell us. His doings with the Cyclops, with the Lotus-eaters, have their relationship with the same belief; but they scarcely bring in any new elements; they only change the method of their treatment and symbolize them in a new way. Hades is more distinctly treated of in the second series; and this is enough to show us that the mortal character of the whole journey has been lost sight of more completely than in the first myths; so we noticed before, that the significance of Calypso's name is half forgotten when her part is assigned to Circe. The journey to Hades from Circe's island, Ææa, tallies exactly with the journey to Scheria from the island of Calypso; only, for the island of the blest is substituted the underground home of souls; and when Odysseus addresses there his companion, Elpenor, whom he had but a little while ago left dead on Circe's island, and asks him how he could have come under the dark west more quickly on foot than Odysseus did sailing in a black ship, we see that the meaning of the ocean journey is forgotten, and that a sort of confusion has arisen between the Hades under men's feet, to which the souls of the dead descend, and the Hades at the end of the journey lying far away. This part, then, is not significant of the Greek belief concerning an earthly Paradise. The learned Welcker, who first showed how these Phæacean ships were the carriers of souls,[25] wishes also to connect the myth with some non-Hellenic source. He supposes it to have been gathered from the Teutons. But surely we are not obliged to go so far, unless we are prepared to consider Charon non-Hellenic also; and no one can really pretend that. For the Phæacean myth is in many ways truer than the myth of Charon and Styx. Styx is but the earth-river (or sea), Oceanus, transferred to beneath the earth; and the story of the ferryman is a compromise between the two creeds--that of the _under_-world and that of the western paradise beyond sea; while the myth of the Phæaceans is a simple expression of the last. The connection which we find between Greek and German in these beliefs is derivable only from their common ancestry--not from a contact in later days. Certainly these legends have