Odyssey, xxiii. 190-201.

Did anyone ever imitate the admirable precedent?  Were I a young man, and an owner of land, assuredly I would do so.  Choose some goodly tree, straight-soaring; cut away head and branches; leave just the clean trunk and build your house about it in such manner that the top of the rooted timber rises a couple of feet above your bedroom floor.  The trunk need not be manifest in the lower part of the house, but I should prefer to have it so; I am a tree-worshipper; it should be as the visible presence of a household god.  And how could one more nobly symbolize the sacredness of Home?  There can be no home without the sense of permanence, and without home there is no civilization—­as England will discover when the greater part of her population have become flat-inhabiting nomads.  In some ideal commonwealth, one can imagine the Odyssean bed a normal institution, every head of a household, cottager or lord (for the commonwealth must have its lords, go to!), lying down to rest, as did his fathers, in the Chamber of the Tree.  This, one fancies, were a somewhat more fitting nuptial chamber than the chance bedroom of a hotel.  Odysseus building his home is man performing a supreme act of piety; through all the ages that picture must retain its profound significance.  Note the tree he chose, the olive, sacred to Athena, emblem of peace.  When he and the wise goddess meet together to scheme destruction of the princes, they sit [Greek text].  Their talk is of bloodshed, true; but in punishment of those who have outraged the sanctity of the hearth, and to re-establish, after purification, domestic calm and security.  It is one of the dreary aspects of modern life that natural symbolism has all but perished.  We have no consecrated tree.  The oak once held a place in English hearts, but who now reveres it?—­our trust is in gods of iron.  Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable?  One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others—­the minted round of metal.  And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart’s contentment.

XVI.

I have been dull to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is that I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn.  The scope of knowledge has become so vast.  I put aside nearly all physical investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a matter of idle curiosity.  This would seem to be a considerable clearing of the field; but it leaves what is practically the infinite.  To run over a list of only my favourite subjects, those to which, all my life long, I have more or less applied myself, studies which hold in my mind the place of hobbies, is to open vistas of intellectual despair.