The Queen of the Air | Page 9

children were born
in the sacred chambers,--six daughters and six strong sons; and they
dwell foreer with their beloved father and their mother, strict in duty;
and with them are laid up a thousand benefits; and the misty house
around them rings with fluting all the day long." Now, you are to note
first, in this description, the wall of brass and the sheer rock. You will
find, throughout the fables of the tempest-group, that the brazen wall
and the precipice (occurring in another myth as the brazen tower of
Danaë) are always connected with the idea of the towering cloud
lighted by the sun, here truly described as a floating island. Secondly,
you hear that all treasures were laid up in them; therefore, you know
this Æolus is lord of the beneficent winds ("he bringeth the wind out of
his treasuries"); and presently afterwards Homer calls him the
"steward" of the winds, the master of the store-house of them. And this
idea of gifts and preciousness in the winds of heaven is carried out in
the well-known sequel of the fable: Æolus gives them to Ulysses, all
but one, bound in leathern bags, with a glittering cord of silver; and so
like bags of treasure that the sailors think they are so, and open them to
see. And when Ulysses is thus driven back to Æolus, and prays him
again to help him, note the deliberate words of the king's refusal,--"Did
I not," says he, "send thee on thy way heartily, that thou mightest reach
thy country, thy home, and whatever is dear to thee? It is not lawful for
me again to send forth favorably on his journey a man hated by the
happy gods." This idea of the beneficence of Æolus remains to the
latest times, though Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the cloud
island into Lipari, has lost it a little; but even when it is finally
explained away by Diodorus, Æolus is still a kind-hearted monarch,
who lived on the coast of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and
established a system of storm signals.
20. Another beneficent storm-power, Boreas, occupies an important

place in early legend, and a singularly principal one in art; and I wish I
could read to you a passage of Plato about the legend of Boreas and
Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of the Ilissus--notwithstannding
its severe reflection upon persons who waste their time on mythological
studies; but I must go on at once to the fable with which you are all
generally familiar, that of the Harpies.
* Translated by Max Müller in the opening of his essay on
"Comparative Mythology."--Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii.
This is always connected with that of Boreas or the north wind, because
the two sons of Boreas are enemies of the Harpies, and drive them
away into frantic flight. The myth in its first literal form means only the
battle between the fair north wind and the foul south one: the two
Harpies, "Stormswift" and "Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rainbow;
that is to say, they are the broken drifts of the showery south wind, and
the clear north wind drives them back; but they quickly take a deeper
and more malignant significance. You know the short, violent, spiral
gusts that lift the dust before coming rain: the Harpies get identified
first with these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so they are
called "Harpies," "the Snatchers," and are thought of as entirely
destructive; their manner of destroying being twofold,--by snatching
away, and by defiling and polluting. This is a month in which you may
really see a small Harpy at her work almost whenever you choose. The
first time that there is threatening of rain after two or three days of fine
weather, leave your window well open to the street, and some books or
papers on the table; and if you do not, in a little while, know what the
Harpies mean, and how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll give up
my Greek myths.
21. That is the physical meaning. It is now easy to find the mental one.
You must all have felt the expression of ignoble anger in those fitful
gusts of storm. There is a sense of provocation in their thin and
senseless fury, wholly different from the nobler anger of the greater
tempests. Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the Greek thinks
of them always as vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the Sons of
Boreas, who are kindly winds, that fill sails, and wave harvests,--full of
bracing health and happy impulses. From this lower and merely greater
terror, always associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed
indicative of the most destructive winds; and they are