To ease my hands, the roots were crept so low Beneath the earth, and so aloft did grow The far-spread arms that, though good height I gat, I could not reach them. To the main bole flat I, therefore, still must cling; till up again She belch’d my mast, and after that amain My keel came tumbling. So at length it chanc’d To me, as to a judge that long advanc’d To judge a sort of hot young fellows’ jars, At length time frees him from their civil wars, When glad he riseth and to dinner goes; So time, at length, releas’d with joys my woes, And from Charybdis’ mouth appear’d my keel. To which, my hand now loos’d and now my heel, I altogether with a huge noise dropp’d, Just in her midst fell, where the mast was propp’d, And there row’d off with owers of my hands. God and man’s Father would not from her sands Let Scylla see me, for I then had died That bitter death that my poor friends supplied. Nine days at sea I hover’d; the tenth night In th’ isle Ogygia, where, about the bright And right renown’d Calypso, I was cast By pow’r of Deity; where I lived embrac’d With love and feasts. But why should I relate Those kind occurrents? I should iterate What I in part to your chaste queen and you So late imparted. And, for me to grow A talker-over of my tale again, Were past my free contentment to sustain.” FINIS DUODECIMI LIBRI HOM. ODYSS. _Opus novem dierum._ _Σὺν Θεᾳ._ [1] _Πέλειαι τρήρωνες. Columbæ timidæ._ What these doves were, and the whole mind of this place, the great Macedon asking Chiron Amphipolites, he answered: They were the Pleiades or seven Stars. One of which (besides his proper imperfection of being _ἀμυδρὸς,_ i.e. _adeo exilis, vel subobscurus, ut vix appareat_) is utterly obscured or let by these rocks. Why then, or how, Jove still supplied the lost one, that the number might be full, Athenæus falls to it, and helps the other out, interpreting it to be affirmed of their perpetual septenary number, though there appeared but six. But how lame and loathsome these prosers show in their affected expositions of the poetical mind, this and an hundred others, spent in mere presumptuous guess at this inaccessible Poet, I hope will make plain enough to the most envious of any thing done, besides their own set censures and most arrogant over-weenings. In the 23 of the lliads (being _ψ_) at the games celebrated at Patroclus’ funerals, they tied to the top of a mast _πέλειαν τρήρωνα, timidam columbam,_ to shoot at for a game, so that (by these great men’s abovesaid expositions) they shot at the Pleiades.