"Listen! for verily it is of beauty's queen, or of the Graces, that we turn the glebe, approaching the rocky centre of the deep-voiced earth: where for the blest Emmenidæ and stream-washed Acragas, yea, and for Zenocrates, is built a treasure-house of Pythian hymns in the golden Apollonian vale. This, no rain of winter, driving on the wings of wind the pitiless army of the rushing cloud, no hurricane shall toss, storm-lashed with pebbles of the uptorn beach, into the briny ocean caves; but in pure light its glorious face shall speak the victory that brings a common fame on thy sire, Thrasybulus, and thy race, remaining in the windings of Crissean valleys."[122] We have already seen how Pindar compares his odes to arrows, to sun-soaring eagles, to flowers of the Muses, to wine in golden goblets, to water, to a shrine which no years will fret away. Another strange figure[123] may be quoted from the third Nemean (line 76): "I send to thee this honey mingled with white milk; the dew of their mingling hangs around the bowl, a draught of song, flowing through the Æolian breath of flutes." It will be perceived that to what is called confusion of metaphors Pindar shows a lordly indifference. Swift and sudden lustre, the luminousness of a meteor, marks this monarch of lyric song. He grasps an image, gives it a form of bronze, irradiates it with the fire of flame or down-poured sunlight. To do justice to Pindar's power of narrative by extracts and translations is impossible. No author suffers more by mutilation and by the attempt to express in another language and another rhythm what he has elaborately fashioned. Yet it may be allowed me to direct attention to the rapidity with which the burning of Coronis (Pyth. iii. 38) and the birth of Rhodes from the sea (Ol. vii. 54) are told in words the grandest, simplest, and most energetic that could be found. This is the birth of Iamos (Ol. vi. 39): Nor could she hide from Æpytus the seed Divine: but he to Pytho, chewing care, Journeyed to gain for this great woe some rede; She loosening her crimson girdle fair, And setting on the ground her silver jar, Beneath the darksome thicket bare a son, Within whose soul flamed godhead like a star; And to her aid the golden-haired sent down Mild Eleithuia and the awful Fates, Who stood beside, while from the yearning gates Of childbirth, with a brief and joyous pain, Came Iamos into the light, whom she therewith Sore-grieving left upon the grass: amain By gods' decree two bright-eyed serpents lithe Tended, and with the harmless venom fed Of bees, the boy; nor ceased they to provide Due nurture. But the king, what time he sped Homeward from rocky Pytho, to his side Called all his household, asking of the son Born of Evadne, for he said that none