Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/144

 it will run; at another they dance in rows opposite one another. … Among them sang and played upon his harp a bard divine, and two tumblers whirled among them as the song directed."

So, in the hymn to the Delian Apollo, Delian maidens in the service of Apollo sing a hymn which pleases the assembled multitude, and consists partly in a dramatic imitation of different languages or dialects, and partly in the production of certain sounds by instruments apparently resembling the Spanish castanets. Again, Ulysses, looking at the Phæacian youths who form the chorus of the song of Demodokus, admires not the sweetness of their voices but (as Gray might have expressed it) the glance of their many-twinkling feet. "So spake the godlike Alkinous, and a herald uprose to bear a hollow lyre from the royal house. Then judges of the folk, nine chosen men in all, who were wont to order all things well in the contests, stood up; they levelled the dancing-place and made a fair wide ring. So, bearing a loud-sounding lyre for Demodokus, the herald drew near; and Demodokus gat him into the midst, and round him stood boys in their first bloom, skilled in the dance, and they struck the good floor with their feet; and Ulysses gazed at the twinkling feet  and marvelled in spirit." Indeed, the very words molpê and melpesthai, applied as they were by the Greeks to singing, dancing, and even any graceful gesticulation (as in a game at ball ), significantly mark