In another part of the poem, their sacred cave is thus described:--

But at the harbour's head a long-leafed olive Grows, and near to it lies a lovely cave, Dusky and sacred to the Nymphs, whom men Call Nades. In it large craters lie, And two-eared pitchers, all of stone, and there Bees build their combs. In it, too, are long looms Of stone, and there the Nymphs do weave their robes, Sea-purple, wondrous to behold. Aye-flowing Waters are there; two entrances it hath; That to the north is pervious unto men; That to the south more sacred is, and there Men enter not, but 'tis the Immortals' path.

Yet though thus exalted in rank, the Homeric Nymphs frequently 'blessed the bed' of heroes; and many a warrior who fought before Troy could boast descent from a Nas or a Nereis.

The sweet, gentle, pious, Ocean-nymphs, who in the Prometheus of aeschylus appear as the consolers and advisers of its dignified hero, seem to hold a nearly similar relation with man to the supernal gods.

Beholding the misery inflicted on Prometheus by the power of Zeus, they cry,--

May never the all-ruling Zeus set his rival power Against my thoughts; Nor may I ever fail The gods, with holy feasts Of sacrifices, drawing near, Beside the ceaseless stream Of father Ocean: Nor may I err in words; But this abide with me And never fade away.

One of the most interesting species of Nymphs is the Dryads, or Hamadryads, those personifications of the vegetable life of plants. In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, we find the following full and accurate description of them. Aphrodite, when she informs Anchises of her pregnancy, and her shame to have it known among the gods, says of the child:--

But him, when first he sees the sun's clear light, The Nymphs shall rear, the mountain-haunting Nymphs, Deep-bosomed, who on this mountain great And holy dwell, who neither goddesses Nor women are. Their life is long; they eat Ambrosial food, and with the deathless frame The beauteous dance. With them, in the recess Of lovely caves, well-spying Argos-slayer And the Sileni mix in love. Straight pines Or oaks high-headed spring with them upon The earth man-feeding, soon as they are born; Trees fair and flourishing; on the high hills Lofty they stand; the Deathless' sacred grove Men call them, and with iron never cut.

But when the fate of death is drawing near, First wither on the earth the beauteous trees, The bark around them wastes, the branches fall, And the Nymph's soul at the same moment leaves The sun's fair light.

They possessed power to reward and punish these who prolonged or abridged the existence of their associate-tree. In the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, Phineus thus explains to the heroes the cause of the poverty of Peraebius:--

But he was paying the penalty laid on His father's crime; for one time, cutting trees Alone among the hills, he spurned the prayer Of the Hamadryas Nymph, who, weeping sore, With earnest words besought him not to cut The trunk of an oak tree, which, with herself Coeval, had endured for many a year.

But, in the pride of youth, he foolishly Cut it; and to him and to his race the Nymph Gave ever after a lot profitless.

The Scholiast gives on this passage the following tale from Charon of Lampsacus:

A man, named Rhcus, happening to see an oak just ready to fall to the ground, ordered his slaves to prop it. The Nymph, who had been on the point of perishing with the tree, came to him and expressed her gratitude to him for having saved her life, and at the same time desired him to ask what reward he would. Rhcus then requested her to permit him to be her lover, and the Nymph acceded to his wishes. She at the same time charged him strictly to avoid the society of every other woman, and told him that a bee should be her messenger. One time the bee happened to come to Rhcus as he was playing at draughts, and he made a rough reply. This so incensed the Nymph that she deprived him of sight.

Similar was the fate of the Sicilian Daphnis.[500] A Nas loved him and forbade him to hold intercourse with any other woman under pain of loss of sight. Long he abstained, though tempted by the fairest maids of Sicily. At length a princess contrived to intoxicate him: he broke his vow, and the threatened penalty was inflicted.

FOOTNOTES:

[499] See our Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, where (p. 237) most of what follows will be found, with notes.

[500] Parthenius Erotica, chap. xxix.

ITALY.

Faune Nympharum fugientum amator, Per meos fines et aprica rura Lenis incedas, abeasque parvis aequus alumnis.

HORATIUS.

Unfortunately for our knowledge of the ancient Italian mythology, the ballad-poetry of Rome is irrecoverably lost. A similar fate has befallen the literature of Etruria, Umbria, and other parts of the peninsula. The powerful influence exercised by Grecian genius over the conquerors of the Grecian states utterly annihilated all that was national and domestic in literature. Not but that Latin poetry abounds in mythologic matter; but it is the mythology of Greece, not of Italy; and the reader of Virgil and Ovid will observe with surprise how little of what he meets in their works is Italian.

So much however of the population of ancient Italy, particularly of Latium, was Pelasgian, that it is natural to suppose a great similarity between the religious systems of Latium and Hellas. The Latins do not, however, appear to have believed in choirs of Nymphs.

Those we read of, such as Egeria, Anna Perenna, Juturna, are all solitary, all dwellers of fountains, streams, and lakes. The Italian Diana did not, like the Grecian Artemis, speed over the mountains attended by a train of buskined nymphs. No Dryads sought to avert the fate of their kindred trees--no Nereides sported on the waves.

Dwarfish deities they had none. We are indeed told of the Lars, particularly the rural Lars, as answering to the Gothic Dwarfs; but no proofs are offered except the diminutive size of their statues. This we hold to amount to nothing. Are we to suppose the following lines of Plautus to have been delivered by an "eyas?"

Lest any marvel who I am, I shall Briefly declare it. I am the family Lar Of this house whence you see me coming out.

'Tis many years now that I keep and guard This family; both father and grandsire Of him that has it now, I aye protected.

Now his grandsire intrusted me a treasure Of gold, that I, unknown to all, should keep it.

He has one daughter, who, each day with wine Or incense, or with something, worships me.

She gives me crowns, and I in recompense Have now made Euclio find the treasure out, That if he will, he may more readily Get her a match.[501]

The Lars were a portion of the Etrurian religion. The Etruscan word Lar signifies Lord, with which it has a curious but casual resemblance.[502] The Lars were regarded, like the Grecian heroes, as being the souls of men who, after death, still hovered about their former abodes, averting dangers from, and bestowing blessings on, the inhabitants. They differed from the Penates, who were, properly speaking, Gods, beings of a higher nature, personifications of natural powers, the givers of abundance and wealth.

The old Italians, it appears, believed in a being, we know not of what size, called an Incubo, that watched over treasure. "But what they say I know not," says Petronius,[503] "but I have heard how he snatched the cap of an Incubo and found a treasure."

Respecting the Fairy mythology of the modern Italians, what we have been able to collect is very little.

The people of Naples, we are told,[504] believe in a being very much resembling the Incubo, whom they call the Monaciello, or Little Monk.

They describe him as a short, thick kind of little man, dressed in the long garments of a monk, with a broad-brimmed hat. He appears to people in the dead of the night, and beckons to them to follow him. If they have courage to do so, he leads them to some place where treasure is concealed. Several are said to have made sudden fortunes through him. In the Neapolitan story-book, named the Pentamerone, of which we shall presently give an account, we meet with a Monaciello of a very different character from this guardian of hidden treasure.

In the second tale of the first day of that work, when the prince in the night heard the noise made by the Fairy in his room, "he thought it was some chamber-boy coming to lighten his purse for him, or some Monaciello to pull the clothes off him." And in the seventh tale of the third day of the same collection, when Corvetto had hidden himself under the Ogre's[505] bed to steal his quilt, "he began to pull quite gently, when the Ogre awoke, and bid his wife not to pull the clothes that way, or she'd strip him, and he would get his death of cold."

"Why, it's you that are stripping me," replied the Ogress, "and you have not left a stitch on me." "Where the devil is the quilt?" says the Ogre; and putting his hand to the ground, he happened to touch the face of Corvetto, and immediately began to shout out, "The Monaciello, the Monaciello, hola! candles! run, run!" Corvetto, meanwhile, got off with his prize through the window.[506]

It is quite clear that the Monaciello is the same kind of being as the House-spirit of the Gotho-German nations. He seems to belong peculiarly to Naples, for we have not heard of him in any other part of Italy. Now we are to recollect that this was the very place in which the Normans settled, and so he may be their Nis or Kobold;[507]

or, as he is so very like the Spanish Duende, he may be that being introduced by the Aragonese, who seem to have exercised so much influence over the language and manners of the people of Naples.

The belief in Mermaids also prevailed in modern Italy. In the reign of Roger, king of Sicily, a young man happening to be bathing in the sea late in the evening, perceived that something was following him.

Supposing it to be one of his companions, he caught it by the hair, and dragged it on shore. But finding it to be a maiden of great beauty and of most perfect form, he threw his cloak about her, and took her home, where she continued with him till they had a son. There was one thing however which greatly grieved him, which was the reflection that so beautiful a form should be dumb, for he had never heard her speak.

One day he was reproached by one of his companions, who said that it was a spectre, and not a real woman, that he had at home: being both angry and terrified, he laid his hand on the hilt of his sword, and urged her with vehemence to tell him who or what she was, threatening if she did not do so, to kill the child before her eyes. The spirit only saying, that he had lost a good wife by forcing her to speak, instantly vanished, leaving her son behind. A few years after, as the boy was playing on the sea-shore with his companions, the spirit his mother dragged him into the sea, where he was drowned.[508]

We now come to the Fate of romance and tale.

The earliest notice that we can recollect to have seen of these potent ladies is in the Orlando Innamorato, where we meet the celebrated Fata Morgana, who would at first appear to be, as a personification of Fortune, a being of a higher order.

Ivi e una fata nomata Morgana, Che a le genti diverse dona l'oro; Quanto e per tutto il mondo or se ne spande Convien che ad essa prima si dimande.

L. I. c. xxv. st. 5. ed. 1831.

But we afterwards find her in her proper station, subject, with the Fate and Witches, to the redoubtable Demogorgon.[509] When Orlando, on delivering Zilante from her, makes her swear by that awful power, the poet says:

Sopra ogni fata e quel Demogorgone (Non so se mai l'odiste raccontare) E giudica tra loro e fa ragione, E quel che piace a lui pu di lor fare.

La notte si cavalea ad un montone, Travarca le montagne e passa il mare, E _strigie_, e _fate_, e fantasime vane Batte con serpi vive ogni dimane.

Se le ritrova la dimane al mondo, Perche non ponno al giorno comparire, Tanto le batte al colpo furibondo Che volentier vorrien poter morire.

Or le incatena giu nel mar profondo, Or sopra il vento scalze la fa gire, Or per il fuoco dietro a se le mena; A cui da questa, a cui quell' altra pena.

L. II. c. xiii. st. 27, 28.

According to Ariosto,[510] Demogorgon has a splendid temple palace in the Himalaya mountains, whither every fifth year the Fate are all summoned to appear before him, and give an account of their actions.