To scatter hosts, and terrify mankind....
Deep horror seizes ev’ry Grecian breast,
Their force is humbled, and their fear confest.
So flies a herd of oxen, scattered wide,
No swain to guard them, and no day to guide,
When two fell lions from the mountain come,
And spread the carnage thro’ the shady gloom....
The Grecians gaze around with wild despair,
Confused, and weary all their pow’rs with prayer.[1]
A generation whose fathers remembered the time when men educated in universities regarded Franklin with his lightning-rod as ‘heaven-defying,’ can readily understand the legend of Vulcan—type of the untamed force of fire—being sent to bind Prometheus, master of fire.[2] How much fear of the forces of nature, as personified by superstition, levelled against the first creative minds and hands the epithets which Franklin heard, and which still fall upon the heads of some scientific investigators! Storm, lightning, rock, ocean, vulture,—these blend together with the intelligent cruelty of Jove in the end; and behold, the Dragon! The terrors of nature, which drive cowards to their knees, raise heroes to their height. Then it is a flame of genius matched against mad thunderbolts. Whether the jealous nature-god be Jehovah forbidding sculpture, demanding an altar of unhewn stone, and refusing the fruits of Cain’s garden, or Zeus jealous of the artificer’s flame, they are thrown into the Opposition by the artist; and when the two next meet, he of the thunderbolt with all his mob will be the Dragon, and Prometheus will be the god, sending to its heart his arrow of light.