According To Fable, When The Island Of AEgina Was Depopulated By
Sickness, At The Instance Of AEacus, Jupiter Turned The Ants Into
Men, That Is, As Some Think, He Made Men Of The Inhabitants Who
Lived Meanly Like Ants.
This is perhaps the fullest history of
those early days extant.
The fable which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy
the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful
though strange as a wild-flower, is to the wise man an apothegm,
and admits of his most generous interpretation. When we read
that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt
into the sea, mistaking it for a meadow full of flowers, and so
became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth
of this, but rather a higher poetical truth. We seem to hear the
music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not
gratified. For their beauty, consider the fables of Narcissus,
of Endymion, of Memnon son of Morning, the representative of all
promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose
memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the
beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone
afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant
ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of
names which have already become part of the universal language of
civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or
nouns, - the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the
Muses, Nemesis, &c.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 56 of 422
Words from 15415 to 15674
of 116321
