They talked about the Sphinx again, yet said little. It holds more meaning in its passive womb than talk will ever play the midwife to. It was the child of the Destructive Element and Feeling,—Typhon and Echidna,—the human heart experienced in misfortune touched by death. Thought rooted in the actual and developed by tenderness was rooted in this figure. “Everybody knows that Wisdom stings,” said MARGARET, and so we went on to the serpent. Somebody spoke of the Greek Tartarus. IDA RUSSELL thought its torment was not acute, but consisted of the deprivation of comforts. The wandering idleness of it would be intolerable to an active Greek, ELISABETH HOAR thought, but more endurable than any device of a priesthood. As for our serpent, no one seemed to know much about it. MARGARET said that we owed it so much, that _she_ felt in duty bound to know something of it. JAMES F. CLARKE said that the Christian serpent was quite another thing. Everybody laughed at the idea of a _Christian_ serpent. WILLIAM WHITE professed great admiration for the reptile. We should have had no Christianity but for its beguiling. MARGARET agreed!—and said she supposed everybody felt that. MRS. RUSSELL thought the casting of the skin very expressive. JAMES F. CLARKE gave Coleridge’s exposition, to the effect that the serpent was the common understanding! It would touch and handle all things, and even sought to be as the Gods, knowing good from evil. Its undulating motion—its belly now on the ground, now off—expressed both the aspiration and the subserviency of the creature. MARGARET asked if serpents ever swallowed their own tails? CHARLES WHEELER said that must be an arbitrary form. MARGARET replied, that she had been struck by the difference between the Mexican and the Greek serpent. The Mexican was folded back upon itself. Not always, I said. Its tail is sometimes in its mouth, and the variations seem to be occasioned by the architectural necessity. JAMES F. CLARKE spoke of a Virginia snake that moves in a circle, and asked if when Mr. Emerson talked about “coming full circle” he was not thinking of that? MARGARET laughed, and declared that serpent must be of Yankee invention. Æsculapius bore two on his staff, Mercury two on his divining-rod, and the cock was also sacred to Æsculapius. I asked if this did not indicate a certain subjection of these Gods to Wisdom? Some questions written on paper were here read. One asked why Minerva was born of the stroke of Vulcan, and why she was the patroness of weavers, and what that had to do with the story of Arachne. MARGARET replied with ill temper to the first, that it was because Vulcan held the hammer,—to the second, that she did not know. But was there really so little meaning in the fact that Mechanic Art so ministered to Intelligent Will that she could afford to miss the point? She said we could see that Minerva was told to marry Vulcan, but declined; would have nothing to do with the sooty cripple.