Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/87

 it. (v. 247.) |  |  |  "'Tis far for me to fare along the well-worn track; time urges; yea, and I know a speedy path; to many have I shown the ways of song. The speckled dragon with the glaring eyes he slew, Arcesilas, by wiles...." Remark the skill of the abrupt vocative, which at once turns our thoughts back to the primary theme. A few rapid verses now carry us from Colchis to Lemnos—where the Argonaut Euphemus begat the ancestry of Battus—and from Lemnos to Cyrene, the realm committed by Apollo to "the upright counsels" of the dynasty which Arcesilas represents. This directly leads to a criticism—veiled in the beautiful allegory of the oak—on the sentence by which Arcesilas has lopped a goodly branch from the tree of the Cyrenean State; and the ode concludes with a noble and touching plea for Damophilus, the banished kinsman of the prince.

It is interesting to note the connection of the words quoted above—. He is cutting short an epic narrative in a fashion altogether his own. The which he claims to know is the art of swift passage from myth back to theme; and he says that he can exercise this art with confident tact, being, in truth, the leader who has shown lyric poets how mythical ornament may be a source of endless variety and