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Updated: May 20, 2025
We were unable to leave our seats on the stern-deck; for everything around us seemed to have assumed the character of enchantment, and had I been educated in the Grecian mythology I should scarcely have been surprised to find an assemblage of Dryads, Naiads and Oreads sporting on the plain beside us.
Those oaks, ivy garlanded like Maenads, which guarded the shallow white weirs whence the stream leaps down; those ilexes, whose dark, loose boughs hung over the beryl pools like hair of drinking nymphs; those trees which were indeed the living and divine owners of that secluded place, dryads and oreads older and younger than any mortals, have now been shamefully stripped, violated and maimed, their shorn-off leafage, already withered, gathered into faggots or trodden into the mud made by woodcutters' feet in the place of violets and tender grasses and wild balm; their flayed bodies, hacked grossly out of shape, and flung into the defiled water until the moment when, the slaughter and dishonour and profanation being complete, the dealers' carts will come cutting up the turf and sprouting reeds, and carry them off to the station or timber-yard.
The representatives of our Lady, on the other hand, are such as the ancient Rhea, Latona, with her dark and starry veil, Tethys, the world-nurse, and the Artemis of the East, or Syrian Mother; to say nothing of Oreads, Dryads, and Nereids, that without number peopled the mountains, the forests, and the sea.
How out of place would seem a Jove with his beard in ringlets a trim Apollo a sleek Bacchus an ambrosial Venus a slim Diana, and all their attendant groups of Oreads and Cupids amid the ocean mists, and icebound torrents, the flame-scarred mountains, and four months' night of a land which the opposing forces of heat and cold have selected for a battle-field!
Ah, take this wandering wind, was ever such sweetness? And since every inch of earth is historic, since here rose glory to fill the world with wide renown, since here the heroes walked, the gods came down, since Oreads haunt the hill, and Nereïds seek the shore" "Whereabout do Nereïds seek the shore?" she archly asked. "Why, if you must have data," I answered, laughing, "let us say Naples."
Not only so, but he has been awakened to the significance of common things, having at hand an interpreter, and been enabled to be precise where Wordsworth was vague. He has known Zeus in the thunder, in the lightning beheld the shaking of the dread Ægis. In the river source he has seen the breasted nymph; he has seen the Oreads stream over the bare hillside.
There being no chaplain in the party, the grace was short. The two captains carved, but every man was his own Ganymede. The wines were good and abundant: there was champagne for the King's health; claret in which to pledge themselves, gay stormers of the mountains; Burgundy for the oreads who were so gracious as to sit beside them, smile upon them, taste of their mortal fare.
The wasp-gods would be forgotten; probably smoked out as sacrilegious intruders. The lucky seer or poet who struck out the fancy would soon find imitators; and it would become, after a while, a common and popular superstition that Hamadryads haunted the hollow forest trees, Naiads the wells, and Oreads the lawns.
And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased.
The Traveller slaked His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked The Naiad. Sunbeams upon distant hills Gliding apace with shadows in their train, Might with small help from fancy, be transformed Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. The Zephyrs, fanning, as they passed, their wings, Lacked not for love fair objects whom they wooed With gentle whisper.
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