Swift through the gloom a giant-hunter flies;
A ponderous mace of brass, with direful sway,
Aloft he whirls, to crush the savage prey;
Stern beasts in trains that by his truncheon fell,
Now, grisly forms, shoot o'er the lawns of hell."[4]
According to later traditions, the giant Orion, son of Tura and Neptune, was endowed by his father with the faculty of walking upon the sea as well as upon earth. He abandoned himself to the fierce joys of the chase in the wooded isle of Crete, to whose shades he had accompanied Diana and Latona. Swollen with pride, he defied to combat all the monsters of the universe, and was slain by a scorpion which the earth had engendered under his feet. But, through the intercession of Diana, a place was given to him in the firmament opposite Scorpio.
Diurnal Movement.
Let us put aside these dreams of the world's youth, and return to the reality.
Nature, transformed by the ancients into a multiple divinity, never fails to overwhelm with surprise the observer who interrogates her with simplicity and without any preconcerted system. And it was thus that he who first undertook to enumerate the stars, by the help of the constellations, made at once the greatest and most unexpected discovery. What, in fact, was not his astonishment on seeing the gradual displacement of objects which, at the first glance, appeared immovable!