Mythology; Mythology, Greek -- Juvenile literature
To the modern popular mind perhaps none of the goddesses of
Greece--not even Venus herself--has more appeal than has the huntress
goddess, Diana. Those who know but little of ancient statuary can
still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her
quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery
or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink,
slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on
this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is
quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome
young sportswoman whom he finds by the covert side; and Sir Walter's
Diana Vernon has helped the little-read public to realise that the
original Diana was a goddess worthy of being sponsor to one of the
finest heroines of fiction.
But not to the sportsman alone, but also to the youth or maid who
loves the moon--they know not why--to those whom the shadows of the
trees on a woodland path at night mean a grip of the heart, while
"pale Dian" scuds over the dark clouds that are soaring far beyond the
tree-tops and is peeping, chaste and pale, through the branches of the
firs and giant pines, there is something arresting, enthralling, in
the thought of the goddess Diana who now has for hunting-ground the
blue firmament of heaven where the pale Pleiades
"Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid."
Tennyson.
"She gleans her silvan trophies; down the wold
She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee
Mixed with the music of the hunting roll'd,
But her delight is all in archery,
And naught of ruth and pity wotteth she
More than her hounds that follow on the flight;
The goddess draws a golden bow of might
And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay.
She tosses loose her locks upon the night,
And through the dim wood Dian threads her way."
Andrew Lang.
Again and again in mythological history we come on stories of the
goddess, sometimes under her best known name of Diana, sometimes under
her older Greek name of Artemis, and now and again as Selene, the
moon-goddess, the Luna of the Romans. Her twin brother was Apollo, god
of the sun, and with him she shared the power of unerringly wielding a
bow and of sending grave plagues and pestilences, while both were
patrons of music and of poetry.
When the sun-god's golden chariot had driven down into the west, then
would his sister's noiseless-footed silver steeds be driven across the
sky, while the huntress shot from her bow at will silent arrows that
would slay without warning a joyous young mother with her newly-born
babe, or would wantonly pierce, with a lifelong pain, the heart of
some luckless mortal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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