300

Of Thrace, the Satyrs, and the unruly Fauns,
With old Silenus, reeling through the crowd
Which gambols round him, in convulsions wild
Tossing their limbs, and brandishing in air
The ivy-mantled thyrsus, or the torch
Through black smoke flaming, to the Phrygian pipe's
Shrill voice, and to the clashing cymbals, mix'd
With shrieks and frantic uproar. May the gods
From every unpolluted ear avert
Their orgies! If within the seats of men,
Within the walls, the gates, where Pallas holds
The guardian key, if haply there be found
Who loves to mingle with the revel-band
And hearken to their accents; who aspires
From such instructors to inform his breast
With verse; let him, fit votarist, implore
Their inspiration. He perchance the gifts
Of young Lyæus, and the dread exploits,
May sing in aptest numbers: he the fate
Of sober Pentheus, he the Paphian rites,
And naked Mars with Cytherea chain'd,
And strong Alcides in the spinster's robes,
May celebrate, applauded. But with you,
O Naiads, far from that unhallow'd rout,
Must dwell the man whoe'er to praised themes
Invokes the immortal Muse. The immortal Muse
To your calm habitations, to the cave
Corycian or the Delphic mount, will guide
His footsteps; and with your unsullied streams
His lips will bathe: whether the eternal lore
Of Themis, or the majesty of Jove,
To mortals he reveal; or teach his lyre
The unenvied guerdon of the patriot's toils,
In those unfading islands of the bless'd,
Where sacred bards abide. Hail, honour'd Nymphs;
Thrice hail. For you the Cyrenaic shell
Behold, I touch, revering. To my songs
Be present ye with favourable feet,
And all profaner audience far remove.

NOTES

ON

THE HYMN TO THE NAIADS.

VER. 25. .... Love

321

pheus, where he is called Protogonos, or the firstbegotten, is said to have been born of an egg, and is represented as the principal or origin of all these external appearances of Nature. In the fragments of Orpheus, collected by Henry Stephens, he is named Phanes, the discoverer or discloser; who unfolded the ideas of the supreme intelligence, and exposed them to the perception of inferior beings in this visible frame of the world; as Macrobius, and Proclus, and Athenagoras, all agree to interpret the several passages of Orpheus, which they have preserved.

But the Love designed in our text, is the one selfexistent and infinite mind, whom if the generality of ancient mythologists have not introduced or truly described in accounting for the production of the world and its appearances; yet, to a modern poet, it can be no objection that he hath ventured to 510 differ from them in this particular; though, in other respects, he professeth to imitate their manner, and conform to their opinions. For, in these great points of natural theology, they differ no less remarkably among themselves, and are perpetually confounding the philosophical relations of things with the traditionary circumstances of mythic history: upon which very account, Callimach as, in his hymn to Jupiter, declareth his dissent from them concerning even an article of the national creed; adding, that the ancient bards were by no means to be depended on. And yet in the exordium of the old Argonautic poem, ascribed to Orpheus, it is said, that "Love, whom mortals in latter times call Phanes, was the father of the eternally begotten Night;" who is generally represented by these mythological pocts, as being herself the parent of all things; and who, in the Indigitamenta, or Orphic Hymns, is said to be the same with Cypris, or Love itself. Moreover, in the body of this Argonautic poem, t. here the personated Orpheus introduceth himself singing to his lyre in reply to Chiron, he celebrateth "the obscure memory of Chaos, and the natures which it contained within itself in a state of perpetual vicissitude; how the Heaven had its boundary determined; the generation of the Earth; the depth of the ocean; and also the sapient Love, the most ancient, the selfsufficient; with all the beings which he produced when he separated one thing from another." Which noble passage is more directly to Aristotle's purpose in the first book of his metaphysics than any of those which he has there quoted, to show that the ancient poets and mythologists agreed with Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the other more sober philosophers, in that natural anticipation and common notion of mankind concerning the necessity of mind and reason to account for the connection, motion, and good order of the world. For, though neither this poem, nor the hymns which pass under the same name, are, it should seem, the work of the real Orpheus; yet beyond all question they are very ancient. The hymns, more particularly, are allowed to be older than the invasion of Greece by Xerxes; and were probably a set of public and solemn forms of devotion: as appears by a passage in one of them, which Demosthenes hath almost literally cited in his first oration against Aristogiton, as the saying of Orpheus, the founder of their most holy mysteries. On this account, they are of higher authority than any other mythological work now extant, the Theogony of Hesiod himself

Elder than Chaos.] Hesiod, in his Theogony, gives a different account, and make Chaos the eldest of beings; though he assigns to Love neither father nor superior: which circumstance is particularly mentioned by Phædrus, in Plato's Banquet, as being observable not only in Hesiod, but in all other writers both of verse and prose: and on the same occasion he cites a line from Parmenides, in which Love is expressly styled the eldest of all the gods. Yet Aristophanes, in The Birds, affirms, that "Chaos, and Night, and Erebus, and Tartarus, were first; and that Love was produced from an egg, which the sable-winged Night deposited in the immense bosom of Erebus." But it must be observed, that the Love designed by this comic poet was always distinguished from the other, from that original and self-existent being the TO ON or ATA ON of Plato, and meant only the AHMIOTPгOs or second person of the old Grecian trinity; to whom is inscribed an hymn among those which pass under the name of Or

the gods, informs us, that by Jupiter was meant the vegetable soul of the world, which restrained and prevented those uncertain alterations which Saturn, or Time, used formerly to cause in the mundane system.

Ver. 30. Then social reign'd.] Our mythology

not excepted. The poetry of them is often extremely noble; and the mysterious air which prevails in them, together with its delightful impression upon the mind, cannot be better expressed than in that remarkable description with which they inspired the German editor Eschenbach, when he accidentally met with them at Leipsic: "The-here supposeth, that before establishment of the saurum me reperisse credidi," says he, "et pro- vital, vegetative, plastic nature, (represented by fecto thesaurum reperi. Incredibile dictu quo me Jupiter) the four elements were in a variable sacro horrore afflaverint indigitamenta ista deorum: and unsettled condition; but afterwards, well-disnam et tempus ad illorum lectionem eligere cogebar, posed and at peace among themselves. Tethys quod vel solum horrorem incutere animo potest, was the wife of the Ocean; Ops, or Rhea, the nocturnum; cum enim totam diem cousumserim Earth; Vesta, the eldest daughter of Saturn, Fire; in contemplando urbis splendore, et in adeundis, and the cloud-compeller, or Ziùs vepényigén, the quibus scatet urbs illa, viris doctis; sola nox res- Air: though he also represented the plastic printabat, quam Orpheo consecrare potui. In abys-ciple of Nature, as may be seen in the Orphic sum quendam mysteriorum venerandæ antiquitatis hymn inscribed to him. descendere videbar, quotiescunque silente mundo, Ver. 34. solis vigilantibus astris et luna champúre istos hymnos ad manus sumsi.”

Ver. 25. Chaos.] The unformed, undigested mass of Moses and Plato: which Milton calls

"The womb of Nature."

Ib. Love, the sire of Fate.] Fate is the universal system of natural causes; the work of the Omnipotent Mind, or of Love; so Minucius Felix: “Quid aliud est fatum, quam quod de unoquoque nostrum deus fatus est." So also Cicero, in the first book on Divination: "Fatum autem id appello, quod Græci EIPMAPMENHN; id est, ordinem seriemque causarum, cum causa causæ nexa rem ex se gignat -ex quo intelligitur, ut fatum sit non id quod superstitiose, sed id quod physice dicitur causa æterna rerum." To the same purpose is the doctrine of Hierocles, in that excellent fragment concerning Providence and Destiny. As to the three Fates, or Destinies of the poet., they represented that part of the general system of natural causes which relates to man, and to other mortal beings: for so we are told in the hymu addressed to them among the Orphic Indigitamenta, where they are called the daughters of Night, (or Love) and, contrary to the vulgar notion, are distinguished by the epithets of gentle, and tender-hearted. According to Hesiod, Theog. ver. 904, they were the daughters of Jupiter and Themis; but in the Orphic Hymn to Venus, or Love, that goddess is directly styled the mother of Necessity, and is represented, immediately after, as governing the three Destinies, and conducting the whole system of natural causes. Ver. 26. Porn of Fate was Tame.] Cronos, Saturn, or Time, was, according to Apollodorus, the son of Coelum and Tellus. But the author of the hymns gives it quite undisguised by mythological language, and calls him plainly the offspring of the Earth and the starry Heaven; that is, of Fate, as explained in the preceding note.

Ver. 27. Who many sons .......

Devour'd.] The known fable of Saturn devouring his children was certainly meant to imply the dissolution of natural bodies; which are produced and destroyed by Time.

......

the child

......

the sedgy-crowned race.] The rivergods; who, acccording to Hesiod's Theogony, were the sons of Oceanus and Tethys. Ver. 36.

. from them,

Are ye, O Naiads.] The descent of the Naiads is less certain than most points of the Greek mythology. Homer, Odyss. xiii. xuçat Ató5. Virgil, in the eighth book of the Eneid, speaks as if the Nymphs, or Naiads, were the parents of the rivers : but in this he contradicts the testimony of Hesiod, and evidently departs from the orthodox system, which representeth several nymphs as retaining to every single river. On the other hand, Calimachus, who was very learned in all the school-divinity of those times, in his hymn to Delos, maketh Penus, the great Thessalian river-god, the father of his Nymphs: and Ovid, in the fourteenth book of his Metamorphosis, mentions the Naiads of Latium as the immediate daughters of the neighbouring rivergods. Accordingly, the Naiads of particular rivers are occasionally, both by Ovid and Statius, called by a patronymic, from the name of the river to which they belong. Ver. 40. Syrian Daphne.] The grove of Daphne in Syria, near Antioch, was famous for its delightful fountains.

Ver. 46. Hyperion.] A son of Cœlum and Tellus, and father of the Sun, who is thence called, by Pindar, Hyperionides. But Hyperion is put by Homer in the same manner as here, for the Sun himself.

Ver. 49. Your sallying streams.] The state of the atmosphere with respect to rest and motion is, in several ways, affected by rivers and running streams; and that more especially in hot seasons: first, they destroy its equilibrium, by cooling those parts of it with which they are in contact; and secondly, they communicate their own motion: and the air which is thus moved by them, being left heated, is of consequence more elastic than other parts of the atmosphere, and therefore fitter to preserve and to propagate that motion.

Ver. 70. Delian king.] Oue of the epithets of Apollo, or the Sun, in the Orphic hymn inscribed to him.

Ver. 28. Of Rhea.] Jupiter, so called by Pindar. Ver. 29. drove him from the upper sky.] That Jupiter dethroned his father Saturn, is recorded by all the mythologists. Phurnutus, or Cornutus, the author of a little Greek treatise on the nature of Flora.

Ver. 79. Chloris.] The ancient Greek name for

Salamis.

Ver. 204. Thyrsus.] A staff, or spear, wreathed round with ivy: of constant use in the bacchanalian mysteries. Ver. 227. Io Paan.] An exclamation of victory and triumph, derived from Apollo's encounter with Python.

Ver. 252. Cirrha.] One of the summits of Par

Ver. 83. Amalthea.] The mother of the first | tocles, describes the sea-fights of Artemisium and Bacchus, whose birth and education was written, as Diodorus Siculus informs us, in the old Pelasgic character, by Thymates, grandson to Laomedon, and contemporary with Orpheus. Thymates had travelled over Libya to the country which borders on the western ocean; there he saw the island of Nysa, and learned from the inhabitants, that " Ammon, king of Libya, was married in former ages to Rhea, sister of Saturn and the Titans: that he after-nassus, and sacred to Apollo. Near it were several wards fell in love with a beautiful virgin, whose name was Amalthea; had by her a son, and gave her possession of a neighbouring tract of land, wonderfully fertile; which in shape nearly resembling the horn of an ox, was thence called the Hesperian horn, and afterwards the horn of Amalthea: that, fearing the jealousy of Rhea, he concealed the young Bacchus, with his mother, in the island of Nysa;" the beauty of which, Diodorus describes with great dignity and pomp of style. This fable is one of the noblest in all the ancient mythology, and seems to have made a particular impression on the imagination of Milton; the only modern poet (unless perhaps it be necessary to except Spenser) who, in these mysterious traditions of the poetic story, had a heart to feel, and words to express, the simple and solitary genius of antiquity. To raise the idea of his Paradise, he prefers it

even to

that Nysean isle

Girt by the river Triton, where old Cham,
(Whom Gentiles Ammon call, and Libyan Jove)
Hid Amalthea, and her florid son,
Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea's eye.

fountains, said to be frequented by the Muses.
Nysa, the other eminence of the same mountain,
was dedicated to Bacchus.
Ver. 263.
charm the mind of gods.] This
whole passage, concerning the effects of sacred
music among the gods, is taken from Pindar's first
Pythian ode.
Ver. 297.
Phrygian pipe's.] The Phry-
gian music was fantastic and turbulent, and fit to
excite disorderly passions.

Ver. 302.

.........

The gates where Pallas holds

The guardian key. ] It was the office of Minerva to be the guardian of walled cities; whence she was named ΠΟΛΙΑΣ and ΠΟΛΙΟΥΧΟΣ, and had her statues placed in their gates, being supposed to keep the keys; and on that account styled KAHAOYxo2. Ver. 510. fate

Of sober Pentheus.] Pentheus was torn in pieces by the bacchanalian priests and women, for despising their mysteries. Ver. 318.

the cave

Corycian.] Of this cave Pausanias, in his tenth book, gives the following description: "between Delphi and the eminences of Parnassus, in a road to the grotto of Corycium, which has its name from the nymph Corycia, and is by far the most remarkable which I have seen. One may walk a great way into it without a torch. It is of a con

Ver. 94. Edonian band.] The priestesses and other ministers of Bacchus; so called from Edonus, a mountain of Thrace, where his rights were cele-siderable height, and hath several springs within it; brated.

Ver. 105. When Hermes.] Hermes, or Mercury, was the patron of commerce; in which benevolent character he is addressed by the author of the Indigitamenta, in these beautiful lines:

Ερμήνευ πάντων, κερδέμπορε, λυσιμέριμνα,
Ὃς χειρίσθιν ἔχεις εἰρήνης ὅπλον ἀμέμφες.

Ver. 121. Dispense the mineral treasure.] The merchants of Sidon and Tyre made frequent voyages to the coast of Cornwall, from whence they carried home great quantities of tin.

Ver. 156. Hath he not won.] Mercury, the patron of commerce, being so greatly dependent on the good offices of the Naiads, in return obtains for them the friendship of Minerva, the goddess of war; for military power, at least the naval part of it, hath constantly followed the establishment of trade; which exemplifies the preceding observation, that "from bounty issueth power." Ver. 143.

and yet a much greater quantity of water distills from the shell and roof, so as to be continually dropping on the ground. The people round Parnassus hold it sacred to the Corycian nymphs and to Pan."

Ver. 319. Delphic mount.] Delphi, the seat and oracle of Apollo, had a mountainous and rocky situation, on the skirts of Parnassus.

Ver. 327. Cyrena.c.] Cyrene was the native country of Callimachus, whose hymns are the most remarkable example of that mythological passion which is assumed in the preceding poem, and have always afforded particular pleasure to the author of it, by reason of the mysterious solemnity with which they affect the mind. On this account he was induced to attempt somewhat in the same manner; solely by way of exercise: the manner itself being now almost entirely abandoned in poetry. And as the mere genealogy, or the personal adventures of heathen gods, could have been but little interesting to a modern reader; it was therefore thought proper to select some convenient part of the history of Nature, and to employ these ancient bay of Biscay. divinities as it is probable they were first employed; Ver. 150. Egina's gloomy surge.] Near this to wit, in personifying natural causes, and in repreisland, the Athenians obtained the victory of Sala-senting the mutual agreement or opposition of the mis, over the Persian navy. corporeal and inoral powers of the world: which hath been accounted the very highest office of poetry.

Ver. 160.

Calne

Cantabrian surge.] Gibraltar and the

Xerxes saw. This circumstance is recorded in that passage, perhaps the most splendid among all the remains of ancient history, where Plutarch, in his Life of Themis

With cunning hand portraying. Though perchance CVM MOX ITIDEM REIPVBLICÆ BRITANNICE VINDEX RE-
From Blenheim's towers, O stranger, thou art come
Glowing with Churchill's trophies; yet in vain
Dost thou applaud them if thy breast be cold
To him, this other hero; who, in times
Dark and untaught, began with charming verse
To tame the rudeness of his native land.