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After his passionate effort, indescribable depression had overtaken him. 'Words-words! he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of Ætna on the breast of Enceladus.
We are told by Virgil that Mt. Etna marks the spot where the gods in their anger buried Enceladus, one of the rebellious giants. To our myth-making ancestors one of the volcanoes of the Mediterranean, set on a small island of the Lipari group, was the workshop of Vulcan, the god of fire, within whose depths he forged the thunderbolts of the gods.
Then they came to the straits by Lilybæum, and saw Sicily, the three-cornered island, under which Enceladus the giant lies groaning day and night, and when he turns the earth quakes, and his breath bursts out in roaring flames from the highest cone of Ætna, above the chestnut woods.
But at the time, like others, I believed it to be the only mode of silencing the agitation of Jupiter. 'I separated from Enceladus on that question, said a huge Titan, lying his length on the ground and leaning one arm on a granite crag; 'but I am willing to forget all our differences and support him with all my heart and strength in another effort to restore our glorious constitution.
Tityus, we are told, when stretched on the plain, covered nine acres, and Enceladus required the whole of Mount Aetna to be laid upon him to keep him down. We have already spoken of the war which the giants waged against the gods, and of its result. While this war lasted the giants proved a formidable enemy. Some of them, like Briareus, had a hundred arms; others, like Typhon, breathed out fire.
Enceladus apparently forgets that had the Olympians never been permitted to enter Heaven, it would have been unnecessary ever to have combined against their machinations. 'Recrimination is useless, said a Titan, interposing. 'I was one of those who supported Enceladus in the admission of the Olympians above, and I regret it.
'And who is that radiant and golden-haired youth who is seated at his feet? ''Tis no less a personage than Hyperion himself, replied Saturn, 'the favourite counsellor of Enceladus. He is a fine orator, and makes up by his round sentences and choice phrases for the rhetorical deficiencies of his chief, who, to speak the truth, is somewhat curt and husky.
It is the fashion to-day to raise Balzac to the level of the dominating geniuses of the world, such as Homer, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare and Moliere; but for the mind that has accurate vision, how many rocks are overturned on this Enceladus, what staircases are forgotten in his Tower of Babel, as in his Jardies house! Balzac was half a woman, as George Sand was half a man.
ONUS AETNA GRAVIUS: a proverbial expression with an allusion to Enceladus, who, after the defeat of the Giants by Juppiter, was said to have been imprisoned under Mt. Aetna. Cf. Eurip. Hercules Furens, 637; also Longfellow's poem, Enceladus. HAUD SANE DIFFICILEM: 'surely far from difficult'; cf. 83 haud sane facile. QUIBUS: a dativus commodi, 'those for whom there is no aid in themselves'. Cf.
Not until we had discarded Atlas and substituted gravity, until we had forgotten Enceladus and learned the laws of heat, until we had rejected Thor and his hammer and searched after the laws of electricity, could science make any strides onward. An irresponsible spirit playing with the world as his toy killed all science.
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