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HESIOD.
"They wont
To lead the mazy measure, breathing grace
Enkindling love, and glance their quivering feet,"—
To lead the mazy measure, breathing grace
Enkindling love, and glance their quivering feet,"—
they accosted the favoured rustic with their heavenly speech, gave him commission to be the bard of didactic, as Homer was of epic, poetry, and in token of such a function invested him with a staff of bay, symbolic of poetry and song. Hesiod's own account of this vision in the opening of his 'Theogony' is as follows:—
"They to Hesiod erst
Have taught their stately song, the whilst his flocks
He fed beneath all-sacred Helicon.
Thus first those goddesses their heavenly speech
Addressed, the Olympian Muses born from Jove:
'Night-watching shepherds! beings of reproach!
Ye grosser natures, hear! We know to speak
Full many a fiction false, yet seeming true,
Or utter at our will the things of truth.'
So said they, daughters of the mighty Jove,
All eloquent, and gave into mine hand,
Wondrous! a verdant rod, a laurel branch,
Of bloom unwithering, and a voice imbreathed
Divine, that I might utter forth in song
The future and the past, and bade me sing
The blessèd race existing evermore,
And first and last resound the Muses' praise."
—E. 33-48.
Have taught their stately song, the whilst his flocks
He fed beneath all-sacred Helicon.
Thus first those goddesses their heavenly speech
Addressed, the Olympian Muses born from Jove:
'Night-watching shepherds! beings of reproach!
Ye grosser natures, hear! We know to speak
Full many a fiction false, yet seeming true,
Or utter at our will the things of truth.'
So said they, daughters of the mighty Jove,
All eloquent, and gave into mine hand,
Wondrous! a verdant rod, a laurel branch,
Of bloom unwithering, and a voice imbreathed
Divine, that I might utter forth in song
The future and the past, and bade me sing
The blessèd race existing evermore,
And first and last resound the Muses' praise."
—E. 33-48.
The details of this interview, as above recorded, are replete with interest—centred, indeed, in the poet himself, but in some degree also attaching to his reputed works. If the verses are genuine—and that the ancients so accounted them is plain from two allu-
