So you have, on the one side, the winds of
prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness. Understand
that, once, deeply,--any who have ever known the weariness of vain
desires, the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling famine and
thirst of heart,--and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy
Celaeno's shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the
"Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the
trees that are the souls of suicides.
22. Now you must always be prepared to read Greek legends as you trace
threads through figures on a silken damask: the same thread runs through
the web, but it makes part of different figures. Joined with other
colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or
light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different
directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes
you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald--they being all
the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are
interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to
explain in any order.
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