displaying its colors from a lofty dead pine), but were abundant and very destructive, so my informant declared, on Lookout Mountain. Turkeys were still numerous on the mountain, and only the Sunday before one had been seen within the park limits.

The Bachman finch was again in tune at his brush-heap near the well, and between the music and a shady seat I was in no haste to go further. Finally, I experimented to see how near the fellow would let me approach, taking time enough not to startle him in the process. It was wonderful how he held his ground. The "Rock of Chickamauga " himself could not have been more obstiI had almost to tread on him before he would fly. He was a great singer, a genius, and a poet,

nate.

"with modest looks,

And clad in homely russet brown," and withal a lover of the sun, a bird never to be forgotten. I wish I knew how to praise him.

To-day, as on my previous visit, I remarked a surprising scarcity of migrants. With the exception of black-poll warblers, I am not certain that I saw any, though I went nowhere else without finding them in good variety. Had my imagination been equal to such a stretch, I might have suspected that Northern birds did not feel at home on the scene of a great Southern victory. Here and there a nuthatch called, and again I seemed to perceive a decided strangeness in the voice. From the tip of a fruit-tree in the Kelly yard a thrasher or a mocker was singing like one possessed. It was impossible to be sure which it was, and the uncertainty pleased me so much, as a testimony to the thrasher's musical powers, that I would not go round the house in the sun to get a nearer observation. Instead, I went down to look at the monuments of the regulars, with their "men cut in a rock." Thence I returned to Snodgrass Hill for my noonday rest, stopping once more at the well, of course, and reading

GEN. J. B. HOOD WAS WOUNDED
11.10 A. M. 20 SEPT. '63 IN EDGE OF
TIMBER ON COVE ROAD MILE EAST
OF SOUTH, LOOSING HIS LEG.

It was exactly eleven o'clock as I went up the hill toward the tower, and the workmen were already taking down their dinner-pails. Standard time, so called, is an unquestioned convenience, but the stomach of a day-laborer has little respect for convention, and is not to be appeased by a setting back of the clock. For my own part, I was not hungry,

-in that respect, as in some others, I might have envied the day-laborers,— but as men of a certain amusing sort are said to turn up their trousers in New York when it rains in London, so I felt it patriotic to nibble at my luncheon as best I could, now that the clocks were striking twelve in Boston.

The hour (but it was two hours) calls for little description. The breeze was delicious, and the hazy landscape beautiful. The cow-bells and the locusts filled the air with music, the birds kept me company, and for half an hour or more I had human society that was even more agreeable. When the workmen had eaten their dinner at the foot of the tower, four of them climbed the stairs, and my field-glass proved so pleasing a novelty that they stayed till their time was up, to the very last minute. One after another took the glass, and no sooner had it gone the rounds once than it started again; for meanwhile every man had thought of something else that he wanted to look at. They were above concealing their delight, or affecting any previous acquaintance with such a toy, and probably I never before gave so much pleasure by so easy a means. I believe I was as happy as if the blue-wing had sung a full hour. They were rough-looking men,

perhaps, at least they were coarsely dressed, but none of them spoke a rude word; and when the last moment came, one of them, in the simplest and gentlest manner, asked me to accept three relics (bullets) which he had picked up in the last day or two on the hill. It was no great thing, to be sure, but it was better: it was one of those little acts which, from their perfect and unexpected grace, can never be forgotten.

A jaunt through the woods past the Kelly house, after luncheon, brought me to a superfine, spick-and-span new road, -like the new government "boulevard" on Missionary Ridge, of which it may be a continuation, following which I came to the Brotherton house, another war-time landmark, weather-beaten and fast going to ruin. In the woods - cleared of underbrush, and with little herbage were scattered ground flowers: houstonia, yellow and violet oxalis, phlox, cranesbill, bird-foot violets, rue anemones, and spring beauties. I remarked especially a bit of bright gromwell, such as I had found first at Orchard Knob, and a single tuft of white American cowslip (Dodecatheon), the only specimen I had ever seen growing wild. The flower that pleased me most, however, was the blood-red catchfly, which I had seen first on Missionary Ridge. Nothing could have been more appropriate here on the bloody field of Chickamauga. Appealing to fancy instead of to fact, it nevertheless spoke of the battle almost as plainly as the hundreds of decapitated trees, here one and there one, which even the most careless observer could not fail to notice.

From the Brotherton house to the postoffice was a sunny stretch, but under the protection of my umbrella I compassed it; and then, passing the Widow Glenn's (Rosecrans's headquarters), on the road to Crawfish Springs, I came to a diminutive body of water, a sink - hole, which I knew at once could be nothing but Bloody Pond. At the time of the fight it contained the only water to be

had for a long distance. It was fiercely contended for, therefore, and men and horses drank from it greedily, while other men and horses lay dead in it, having dropped while drinking. Now a fence runs through it, leaving an outer segment of it open to the road for the convenience of passing teams; and when I came in sight of the spot, two boys were fishing round the further edge. Not far beyond was an unfinished granite tower, on which no one was at work, though a derrick still protruded from the top. It offered the best of shade, the shadow of a great rock, in the comfort of which I sat awhile, thinking of the past, and watching the peaceful labors of two or three men who were cultivating a broad ploughed field directly before me, crossThen ing and recrossing it in the sun. I took the road again; but by this time I had relinquished all thought of walking to Crawfish Springs, and so did nothing but idle along. Once, I remember, I turned aside to explore a lane running up to a hillside cattle pasture, stopping by the way to admire the activities and they were activities - of a set of big scavenger beetles. Next, I tried for half a mile a fine new road leading across the park to the left, with thick, uncleared woods on one side; and then I went back to Bloody Pond.

The place was now deserted, and I took a seat under a tree opposite. Prodigious bullfrogs, big enough to have been growing ever since the war, lay here and there upon the water; now calling in the lustiest bass, now falling silent again after one comical expiring gulp. It was getting toward the cool of the afternoon. Already the birds felt it. A wood thrush's voice rang out at intervals from somewhere beyond the ploughed land, and a field sparrow chanted nearer by. At the same time my eye was upon a pair of kingbirds, wayfarers hereabout, to judge from their behavior; a crested flycatcher stood guard at the top of a lofty dead tree, and a rough-winged swallow alighted

on the margin of the pool, and began bathing with great enjoyment. It made me comfortable to look at him. By and by two young fellows with fishing-poles came down the railroad.

headquarters were there. Then they passed on down the track out of sight, and all was silent once more, till a chickadee gave out his sweet and quiet song just behind me, and a second swallow

I asked.

"Why?" "Yes."

66

Why, there were a lot of soldiers killed here in the war, and the pond got bloody."

The granite tower in the shadow of which I had rested awhile ago was General Wilder's monument, they said. His

was of the smallest and meanest, - muddy shore, muddy bottom, and muddy water; but men fought and died for it in those awful September days of heat and dust and thirst. There was no better place on the field, perhaps, in which to realize the horrors of the battle, and I was glad to have the chickadee's voice the last sound in my ears as I turned away. Bradford Torrey.

THE kinship of Iliad and Odyssey can never be denied. Despite microscopic dissimilarities which have been noted, the dialect, the metre, and, we may add, with reasonable allowance for the difference in subject, even the vocabulary, remain essentially unchanged as we pass from the earlier to the younger epic. Where the same characters appear in both poems for example, Odysseus, Nestor, Menelaos there is a careful consistency in the traits assigned to them. This statement may be extended even to Achilles, though he appears in the Odyssey only as a ghost in the underworld. The sole important exception, if she be one, is Helen. Even in this case the difference is of course partly one of circumstances; and the restoration of Menelaos' wife to her former position may have been firmly fixed in the legend before Homer. So Tennyson, with all the changes he permits himself, could perhaps hardly have brought back Guinevere to Arthur's throne, or even bidden Elaine live, to wed happily with Launcelot. We may even please ourselves with the belief that our sterner Teutonic or Keltic morality made

the queen's fall from virtue an irreparable one, just as the Greek worship of beauty could hardly be satisfied unless Helen rode, unconquerable still, in all her radiant charms, over the black billows of a war which was aroused by her sin, and had engulfed the chosen youth of her generation!

In what we may call the accidents of structure, also, there are striking analogies between the two Homeric poems. Each deals with the long-delayed but sure and complete fulfillment of a decree uttered by Zeus. In the first book of the Iliad, Thetis prays that the Greeks may suffer in atonement for Achilles' wrongs (508-10), and Zeus impressively nods his assent (524-27). In the assembly of the gods at the opening of the Odyssey, Zeus himself proposes Odysseus' home-return (Book 1. 76, 77), and in the similar divine council which opens Book v. declares it as the settled decree of fate (41, 42): —

"So is it destined that he shall see his beloved, returning

Unto his high-roofed hall and unto the land of his fathers."

This divine machinery seems to us, perhaps, a rather foreign and artificial addition to the ancient epic; and in Virgil's age of skepticism it evidently is so, to some extent. But much the same effect is produced, also, upon our minds, at the present day, by the witch scenes in Macbeth. Yet Hecate and her beldames were, probably, three centuries ago, quite as real to many Englishmen as the gods of the Odyssey were to the poet's first auditors. Indeed, we ourselves are hardly yet far enough removed from Cotton Mather's demonology and the Salem witchcraft to stigmatize either the Homeric theology or Shakespeare's witches as merely a degrading superstition.

As the Iliad opens in the tenth and last year of Troy's beleaguerment, so the companion poem begins with the tenth and final year of Odysseus' long wanderings on his homeward way. Each epic crowds its action into a comparatively small number of days, fifty-one in the Iliad, forty-one in the Odyssey, while even of these a few only are eventful, but both poems give us also, incidentally, vivid pictures of previous events, and significant glimpses as well into the future. As Achilles' doom was thrice foretold with increasing definiteness, so now we hear of Menelaos' destiny (Odyssey IV. 561-69), to be transferred, without dying, to the Elysian plain, because he is wedded to Zeus' daughter Helen; and we listen also to an equally mystical hint as to the hero Odysseus' own last adventure (XI. 13436):

"And Death shall come to thee out of the waters;

Gentle shall be his coming to slay thee, when thou art wearied,

Aging slowly, and seeing thy people happy

about thee."

In the Iliad, we hear only briefly, and as it were accidentally, concerning the origin of the war and its progress hitherto; while four entire books of the younger

epic are taken up with the hero's own account of previous adventures. But it must be remembered that the Iliad professes to deal only with an episode,

Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Achilles, while the Odyssey is a story with a hero: Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who widely

Wandered, when he had sacked that wellwalled city of Troia.

So that these four books of narrative (IX.-XII.) are after all no digression, and require no apology.

The device of plunging into the midst of the action, and permitting a leading character to relate his own exploits, has been imitated frequently; for example, closely by Virgil, less so by Milton. Lovers of the Autocrat will remember how the Breakfast Table was once shocked by the remark, "A woman would rather hear a man talk than an angel, any time!' and how it is justified by the citation of a passage in Paradise Lost, where Adam asks from the archangel concerning the deeper mysteries of creation, but Eve withdraws into the garden :

"Her husband the relator she preferred
Before the Angel."

The magician who told the loves of Othello and Desdemona also realized how effective it is to hear from the hero's own lips the tale

"of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field." Even the Shakespearean motif of woman's love won through sympathy is original with Nausicaa's poet, though Virgil's Dido and her passion make a larger element in the epic plot.

Perhaps it be added, as another may feature of both poems, that the catastrophe is skillfully retarded, and the exact manner in which it will be brought about is long hidden from the listener. As the intervention and death of Patroclos, extinguishing Achilles' wrath in the mightier flame of his grief, could not easily be foreseen, so the trial of strength with the bow, proposed in good faith by

Penelope to decide her choice among the suitors, puts a great advantage into her unrecognized husband's hands. Several passages early in the Odyssey, suggesting that young Telemachos may himself destroy the suitors, especially Pallas Athene's own words reminding the prince of Orestes' brave deed (1. 298-302), leave us in some doubt, until his father and he unite their counsels and their valor in the great closing scenes.

Here, however, we perhaps touch upon the chief defect of the Iliad. Its action is retarded by interruptions, not merely by digressions. The Odyssey is the shorter poem by several thousand lines, but yet has both a much greater variety of interest and a completer unity. We do not, I think, feel at any time that the action of the Odyssey is deliberately and unduly delayed. While Achilles is unseen and almost forgotten through many books of the Iliad, we almost never lose sight of Odysseus, and his fortunes are always of supreme importance. This single and unbroken thread of human interest aids essentially in making the Odyssey what we believe it is, the best of all the good stories that ever were told!

The most striking difference between the two poems may be found in the unvaried setting of the elder epic, the shifting scene of the younger. In the Iliad, our gaze ranges only from the ships and cabins of the Greeks on the Hellespon tine shore to the homes and streets of the beleaguered town, or at farthest to Zeus' seat on Ida whence he overlooks both hosts. Even the divine abodes seem close at hand: the gods, debating only upon the issue of the war, keep their eyes fixed, as it were, upon the Trojan plain, and nearly all of them actually enter the field of battle on some occasion. In the Odyssey, the heavens are grown larger as well as more serene, while of the earth we have an infinitely wider and more varied view. First of all, we glance, with the gods, at Calypso's remote isle, where Odysseus pines in exVOL. LXXVI. NO. 455. 21

ile. Then, after a vivid glimpse at Ithaca and the suitors' misdeeds, we see Telemachos set off for the kingdoms of the mainland. As Nestor and Menelaos relate to him the story of their homeward voyages from Troyland, they seem to put us for the moment in direct connection with the familiar scene of the Iliad. Again, we follow Odysseus as he starts from Calypso's abode, and, sailing, drifting, swimming, reaches at last the Phæacians' shore. At the banquet, we retrace with him the world-wide wanderings, during which each of his comrades has found a miserable end. Presently, we sway over the long surges with him once more, as he passes homeward, sleeping soundly through the all-night voyage, upon the magic bark that flies "swifter than the thought of man." Meantime, the wanderings of Telemachos and the perplexities of Penelope have occasionally divided our attention. Two thirds of the poem are completed when father and son are united in the faithful swineherd's cabin. From this point the swiftly moving action is centred in the little island kingdom of Ithaca.

Some great advantages the Odyssey certainly gains through this widening of its scene. The Iliad offers us, as has been said, a single magnificent picture, that of Troy Besieged. Even the Olympian gods seem merely to occupy a coincident upper stage, as in the mediæval miracle-plays heaven and earth, indeed hell also, are represented simultaneously open before the eyes of the audience. Conditions are, so to speak, abnormal, certainly exceptional, everywhere in the Iliad.

The Greeks are homeless and demoralized. The camp is full of captive widows and orphaned maids condemned to a state worse than mere slavery. The town is crowded with the armies of its allies, and reduced almost to desperation. The very gods in heaven imitate mankind with unseemly quarrels and threats, or even with actual violence, culminating in the opera-bouffe scene