"In dreams I seemed to see an eagle hovering in air on wings of gold, with pinions spread and ready to swoop. I thought I was on the spot where Ganymede was taken from his comrades and borne aloft to the celestial consistory. I pondered--peradventure the great bird only strikes this hill, and peradventure scorns to snatch elsewhere his prey. Then it seemed to me that, after wheeling a while, it swooped, terrible like lightning, and caught me up into the sphere of flame; and there I thought that it and I both burned; and so fiercely did the fire in my imagination blaze, that sleep no longer could endure, but broke." This simile describes the rapidity and fierceness of Pindar's spirit, the atmosphere of empyreal splendor into which he bears us with strong wings and clinging talons. Another image may be borrowed from Horace,[108] who says, Fervet immensusque ruit profundo Pindarus +ore+; likening the poet to a torrent, unrestrained, roaring to the woods and precipices with a thunderous voice. This image does not, like the other, fix our attention upon the quality peculiar to Pindar among all the poets of the world--splendor, fire, the blaze of pure effulgence. But it does suggest another characteristic, which is the stormy violence of his song, that chafes within its limits and seems unable to advance quickly enough in spite of its speed. This violence of Pindar's style, as of some snow-swollen Alpine stream, the hungry Arve or death-cold Lutschine, leaping and raging among granite boulders, has misled Horace into the notion that Pindar's odes are without metrical structure: numerisque fertur Lege solutis: whereas we know that, while pursuing his eagle-flight to the sun, or thundering along his torrent-path, Pindar steadily observed the laws of strophe, antistrophe, and epode with consummate art. A third figure may be chosen from Pindar[109] himself. "As when a man takes from his wealthy hand a goblet foaming with the dew of the grape, and gives it with healths and pledges to his youthful son-in-law to bear from one home to the other home, golden, the crown of his possessions, gracing the feast and glorifying his kinsman, and makes him in the eyes of the assembled friends to be admired for his harmonious wedlock: so I, sending outpoured nectar, the Muse's gift, to conquering heroes, the sweet fruit of the soul, greet them like gods, victors at Olympia and Pytho."