Tales of the Long Bow
Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?" He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed: "Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid," he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, "I will not call you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian, as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediæval heraldry, blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice
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