Unto the tribe of Thamûd we sent their brother, Sâleh. He said, “O, my people, worship God; ye have no god besides him. Now hath a manifest proof come unto you from the Lord. This she-camel of God is a sign unto you; therefore dismiss her freely ... and do her no hurt, lest a painful punishment seize upon you.”--_Al Korân_, vii. ⁂ There is a slight resemblance between this story and that of the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal, so graphically described in _1 Kings_ xviii. =Tham´yris= (_Blind_), a Thracian poet, who challenged the Muses to a contest of song, and was deprived of sight, voice, and musical skill for his presumption (Pliny, _Natural History_, iii. 33, and vii. 57). Plutarch says he had the finest voice of any one, and that he wrote a poem on the _War of the Titans with the Gods_. Suidas tells us that he composed a poem on creation. And Plato, in his _Republic_ (last book), feigns that the spirit of the blind old bard passed into a nightingale at death. Milton speaks of: Blind Thamyris and blind Mæon´idês [_Homer_]. _Paradise Lost_, iii. 35 (1665). =Thanatopsis.= “View of, or meditation upon death.” W. C. Bryant’s poem bearing this name was written when he was but nineteen years old (1818). It is the best of his poems. =Thancmar=, châtelain of Bourbourg, the great enemy of Bertulphe, the provost of Bruges. Charles “the Good,” earl of Flanders, made a law in 1127, that a serf was always a serf till manumitted, and whoever married a serf became a serf. By these absurd laws, the provost of Bruges became a serf, because his father was Thancmar’s serf. By the same laws, Bouchard, though a knight of long descent became Thancmar’s serf, because he married Constance, the provost’s daughter. The result of these laws was that Bertulphe slew the earl and then himself, Constance went mad and died, Bouchard and Thancmar slew each other in fight, and all Bruges was thrown into confusion.--S. Knowles, _The Provost of Bruges_ (1836). =Thaumast=, an English pundit, who went to Paris, attracted by the rumor of the great wisdom of Pantag´ruel. He arranged a disputation with that prince, to be carried on solely by pantomime, without the utterance of a single word. Panurge undertook the disputation for the prince, and Pantagruel was appointed arbiter. Many a knotty point in magic, alchemy, the cabala, geomancy, astrology, and philosophy were argued out by signs alone, and the Englishman freely confessed himself fully satisfied, for “Panurge had told him even more than he had asked.”--Rabelais, _Pantagruel_, ii. 19, 20 (1533).