But in their glimmering orbs did glow,
Until their Lord Himself bespake, and bid them go.”
199. I should also only weary you if I attempted to give you any interpretation of the much-entangled web of Greek fables connected with the story of Halcyone. You observe that in all these passages I have said “King of Trachis” instead of Ceyx. That is partly because I don’t know how to pronounce Ceyx either in Greek or English; but it is chiefly to make you observe that this story of the sea-mew and Halcyon, now known through all the world, like the sea-mew’s cry, has its origin in the “Rough country,” or crag-country, under Mount Œta, made sacred to the Greek mind by the death of Heracles; and observe what strange connection that death has with the Halcyon’s story. Heracles goes to this “Rough country” to seek for rest; all the waves and billows of his life having—as he thinks now—gone over him. But he finds death.
As far as I can form any idea of this “rough, or torn, country” from the descriptions of Colonel Leake or any other traveller, it must resemble closely the limestone cliffs just above Altorf, which break down to the valley from the ridge of the Windgelle, and give source, at their foot, to faultlessly clear streams,—green-blue among the grass.
You will find Pausanias noting the springs of Thermopylæ as of the bluest water he ever saw; and if you fancy the Lake Lucerne to be the sea bay running inland from Artemisium, you will have a clear and useful, nor in any serious way, inaccurate, image of the scene where the Greeks thought their best hero should die. You may remember also, with advantage, that Morgarten—the Thermopylæ of Switzerland—lies by the little lake of Egeri, not ten miles from this bay of Altorf; and that the Heracles of Switzerland is born under those Trachinian crags.
If, farther, you remember that the Halcyon would actually be seen flitting above the blue water of the springs, like one of their waves caught up and lighted by the sun; and the sea-mews haunting the cliffs, you will see how physical circumstances modify the under-tone of the words of every mythic tradition.
I cannot express to you how strange—how more and more strange every day—it seems to me, that I cannot find a single drawing, nor definite account, of scenes so memorable as this, to point you to; but must guess and piece their image together for you as best I can from their Swiss similitudes. No English gentleman can pass through public school-life without knowing his Trachiniæ; yet I believe, literally, we could give better account of the forms of the mountains in the moon, than we could of Œta. And what has art done to help us? How many Skiddaws or Benvenues, for one Œta,—if one! And when the English gentleman becomes an art-patron, he employs his painter-servant only to paint himself and his house; and when Turner was striving, in his youth, to enforce the mythology, and picture these very scenes in Greece, and putting his whole strength into the endeavour to conceive them, the noble pictures remained in his gallery; and for bread, he had to paint —— Hall, the seat of ——, Esquire, with the carriage drive, the summer-house, and the squire going out hunting.
If, indeed, the squire would make his seat worth painting, and would stay there, and would make the seats, or, shall we call them, forms, of his peasantry, worth painting too, he would be interpreting the fable of the Halcyon to purpose.
But you must, at once, and without any interpreter, feel for yourselves how much is implied in those wonderful words of Simonides—written six hundred years before Christ;—“when in the wild winter months, Zeus gives the wisdom of calm;” and how much teaching there is for us in the imagination of past days,—this dream-picture of what is true in days that are, and are to come,—that perfect domestic love not only makes its nest upon the waves, but that the waves will be calm that it may.
200. True, I repeat, for all ages, and all people, that, indeed, are desirous of peace, and loving in trouble! But what fable shall we invent, what creature on earth or sea shall we find, to symbolize this state of ours in modern England? To what sorrowful birds shall we be likened, who make the principal object of our lives dispeace, and unrest; and turn our wives and daughters out of their nests, to work for themselves?