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Conceive my fury when I recognized my own hired bravo, Antonio, who must have betrayed me, and remained instead of the prince. I opened a niche in the wall, kicked his rotten carcass into the lagoon, and, more wretched than ever, returned to this hell wherein I languish, while paradise is within sight." "How long do you intend to make a voluntary Tantalus of yourself."
The story of Tantalus is well told by PROFESSOR BLACKIE, as follows: Tantalus. O Tantalus! thou wert a man More blest than all since earth began Its weary round to travel; But, placed in Paradise, like Eve, Thine own damnation thou didst weave, Without help from the devil. Alas! I fear thy tale to tell; Thou'rt in the deepest pool of hell, And shalt be there forever. For why?
The Greeks recognized this immemorial truth wrapped it in classic traditions, and the myth of Tantalus constituted its swaddling-clothes. You are a scholar, Mr. Murray; look back and analyze the derivation and significance of that fable.
It is its principle to afflict him without intermission; to redouble in him the horrors of death: ever ingenious in tormenting him, it has extended his inquietudes beyond even his own existence; its ministers, the more securely to dispose of him in this world, invented, in future regions, a variety of rewards and punishments, reserving to themselves the privilege of awarding these heavenly recompences to those who yielded most implicitly to their arbitrary laws; of decreeing punishment to those refractory beings who rebelled against their power: thus, according to them, Tantalus for divulging their secrets, must eternally fear, engulphed in burning sulphur, the stone ready to fall on his devoted head; whilst Romulus was beatified and worshipped as a god under the name of Quirinus.
The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two weeks later with Governor Frear and his wife, up the new Castle trail to the mountain-top behind Tantalus, had some features in common with the first walk, the increasing mist and coolness as we entered the mountains, the dripping bushes, and the slippery paths, but we got finer views, and found a better-kept trail.
Taur. 386 ff., where Iphigenia rejects the gods who demand human sacrifice: These tales be false, false as those feastings wild Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child. This land of murderers to its gods hath given Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. Yet just before she has accepted the loves of Zeus and Leto without objection.
Dabbling with the unattainable is calculated to sour us on the world and turn the milk of human kindness into buttermilk. It may be likened to the predicament in which old Tantalus was placed in the lake, where the water receded when he attempted to drink it, and delicious fruits always just eluded his grasp. Next I got hold of the delusion that I was studying and working too hard.
Tired men cannot go on talking all night, even about the events of an exciting day, and one by one our friends rolled themselves up in their coats and went off to sleep. And how the unfortunates on sentry-go envied them! That was an infliction which Tantalus escaped, but it might well compare with those which have caused his name to be embodied in our language.
Tantalus, the son of Pluto, or Wealth, was, according to Pindar, 'a wanderer from happiness, and the name represents a man abounding in wealth, but whose appetite was so insatiable, even at the ambrosial feast of the gods, that it ultimately doomed him to eternal unsatisfied thirst and hunger in Tartarus.
Certainly, to confound Tantalus, ancestor of all the Trojans, with Attalus, ancestor of all the Tuscans, would be worse than that "confusion of Babel" which the quiet-loving potentate came to Florence to avoid.
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