to church an hour before she gave him to the world. Her martial bearing, large bones, strong country speech, clothed the idea with the flesh of the hard fact; her consciousness of purpose, power of will, ennobled and quickened it with the hues of poetry.
Homer must have had some such woman for a mother, in whose womb the Iliads were born prenatally. All that sped, flew, or swam in the aërial kingdom of the Idea must first have had its pinions fixed and pointed by some inarticulate goddess who laid upon herself the humblest functions, the meanest offices, in order that nature might not lack lusty and shrewd servants in the time to be. The teeming millions of creatures who spawned in the darkness, who lifted their scaled eyes to where the light might be found, according to those who had skill in prophecy, yet who themselves were so uncertain of its presence that, when it shone straight before them through the fissures in their cave, they passed it by as a chimera, or the iridescence of some bird, reptile, piece of coal, or winged snake,—these cried out continually for some true-born Child of the Sun to lead them out of that gross night into the molten plains of beauty which ran down to the sea. And it was given to some stalwart creature with a red face and coarse hands and a shabby black hat tied in a bow under the chin, who herself was purblind, yet with knees ever pressed to the flags of the temple, to dream of the light in her prayers, and presently, out of her own strong, rustic body, to furnish forth to her kind a guide, a prophet, and a leader.
As hunger, that exquisite, but cruel, sensation, grew upon Northcote, and caused fierce little shivers to run through his bones, he awoke to the
