Stole from the varying tones that hung
Vibrant on every iron tongue
The secret of the sounding wire,
And formed the seven-corded lyre.”
Shakespeare also refers to this reputed origin of music in “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Pirithous, relating the death of Arcite, tells how he rode the pavement on a horse so black that the superstitious would have feared to buy him, a prancing steed whose iron-shod feet seemed only to touch the stones—as if counting them, rather than trampling them, and—
“thus went counting
The flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the music
His own hoofs made—for, as they say, from iron
Came music’s origin.”
Nevertheless, this story—like many others that cluster about the name of Pythagoras, as, for instance, that he was seen in two cities at the same time—is seriously vulnerable, and is probably pure myth, without enough of fact to qualify as a legend. The obvious objection, that various hammers striking upon an anvil give out, not different notes, but the same—for the notes vary with the anvil and not with the hammers—Longfellow meets by using the plural, anvils.