Thy burning car had never scorch’d the earth!
And, Henry, hadst thou sway’d as kings should do,
Or as thy father and his father did,
Giving no ground unto the house of York,
They never then had sprung like summer flies;
I and ten thousand in this luckless realm
Had left no mourning widows for our death;
And thou this day hadst kept thy chair in peace.”
In the early heroic age, when Minos reigned in Crete and Theseus at Athens, just as Mythology was ripening into history, the most celebrated for mechanical contrivance and for excellence in the arts of sculpture and architecture were Dædalus and his sons Talus and Icarus. To them is attributed the invention of the saw, the axe, the plumb-line, the auger, the gimlet, and glue; they contrived masts and sailyards for ships; and they discovered various methods of giving to statues expression and the appearance of life. Chiefly, however, are Dædalus and Icarus now known for fitting wings to the human arms, and for attempting to fly across the sea from Crete to the shore of Greece. Dædalus, hovering just above the waves, accomplished the aërial voyage in safety; but Icarus, too ambitiously soaring aloft, had his wings injured by the heat of the sun, and fell into the waters, which from his death there were named the Icarian sea.
From the edition of Alciat’s Emblems, 1581, we select a drawing which represents the fall of Icarus; it is dedicated “To Astrologers,” or fortune tellers. The warning in the last two lines is all we need to translate,—