Armed with this, he can defy all Circe's enchantments. She mixed for him the same draught, struck him with her wand, and bid him "go herd with his companions;" but potion and spell had lost their power. Circe had found her master, and knew it could be no other than "the many-wiled Ulysses," of whose visit she had been forewarned. Not even the magic virtues of the herb Moly, however, enable him to resist her proffered love; and Ulysses, by his own confession, forgot Penelope in the halls of Circe, as afterwards in the island of Calypso. It may be offered as his apology, that it was absolutely necessary for him to make himself agreeable to his hostess, in order to obtain from her (as he does at once) the deliverance of his companions from her toils; but this does not explain his sending for the rest of his crew from the ship, and spending a whole year in her society. The ingenious critics who insist on shaping a moral allegory
- ↑ So the Spirit, in Milton's "Comus," gives to the brother of the Lady a sure antidote to the spell of the enchanter (himself represented as a son of Circe):—"Among the rest a small unsightly root,
But of divine effect, he culled me out;
The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on't,
But in another country, as he said,
Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil:
Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain
Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon;
And yet more med'cinal is it than that Moly
That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave."
