Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/354

258 of night," into the regions of darkness. There he recovers Eurydice, but while he looks back upon her she fades before his gaze, as the mists of the morning vanish before the glory of the rising sun.

Cox found in the music of Orpheus the delicious strains of the breezes which accompany sunrise and sunset.

Mrs. Martin thus delightfully refers to Lyra: "It is easy to get some sense of the fancy that gave the constellation its name as we watch it during the lovely spring evenings, floating lightly in the sky, the parallel lines connecting its principal stars vaguely suggestive to the willing mind of some quaint stringed instrument that under a magic touch might send out heavenly music through the resonant air."

Lyra has also borne the title "the harp of Arion," Arion being a famous musician of the court of Periander, King of Corinth. The fable relates that, returning from Sicily, he was about to be thrown overboard by the sailors, when he requested permission to play his harp. This request being granted, presently dolphins appeared, enchanted by the sweet strains, and when Arion plunged into the sea, the dolphins, so it is said, bore him safe to land.

Brown tells us that the Hellenic myth connected with Lyra is the comparatively late story of Hermes (the Lord of Cloud) as the inventor of the Lyre from the tortoise, which is related in the Homeric Hymn.

The earlier history of the constellation is twofold, Euphratean and Phœnician. In the valley of the Euphrates it was originally one of the three birds opposed to Herakles. Thus its principal star, Vega, was known as "the Falling Grype." According to an Arab commentator on Ulugh Beg, ε and ζ Lyras represent the two wings of the Grype, by drawing in which he let himself down to the earth.

On the Phœnician side Lyra is a musical instrument. Aratos names it "Xelus" (the little tortoise or shell), thus going back, says Allen, to the legendary origin of the instrument, from the empty covering of the creature cast