Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/406

 serpent, crept into the garden, and tempted Adam and Eve to their destruction. And from that day to this, Lilith, the cold, passionless beauty with golden hair, has roamed up and down the earth, snaring the sons of Adam and destroying them. You may always know her dead victims; for, whenever a man has been destroyed by the hands of Lilith, you will always find a single golden hair wrapped tight around his lifeless heart."

A late poet unwinds into verse the fatal hair around his heart:—

"Seeing thy face, with all thy fluctuant hair Falling in dull gold opulence from thy brow,  Watching thy light blue eyes, now fired, or now Laughterful, or now dim as with despair, I wonder, friend, that it should be God's care  To have made at all (what matter when or how?) A being so sadly, desolately rare,  So beautifully incomplete as thou!

"O rank, black pool, with one star's imaged form! O deep, rich-hearted rose, with rot at core! O summer heaven, half-purpled with stern storm!  O lily, with one white leaf dipt in gore! O angel shape, whom over curves and clings The awful imminence of a devil's wings!"

Greek genius understood of course that when Pandora was endowed with gifts, Aphrodite took a double handful of the golden foam off Cyprus, whence her own blondness rose, and gilded Pandora's clay. What a pity that the mischievous Hermes put a thieving flattery into that gracious form! It ran into the fingers with an