Tra queste squamme, a la scagliosa ombrella Di questa coda, in questa curva schiena A dreadful face in the Carpathian sea After a sweet one like a deer in flight, Came ploughing up a trough of thunderous might― Rugged and fierce, and all afroth, came he, Dashing the billowy buffets left and right; And on his slippery orbs, with eyes alight For thirst, stoop'd headlong tow'rds the lovely she: Crying, "What boots it to look out for aid In weedy thicks, and run a race with him Of this huge tail, midst all this fishy trim, Oft comes to sit the loveliest shape in heaven." According to Hesiod, Triton is a highly “respectable god, in the modern sense of the word, for he lives "in a golden house." To be sure, he does that, as residing with his father and mother; but, moreover, he is a god redoubtable on his own account deinos a god of awful might,” as Mr. Elton excellently renders it; not "eximius" merely, or egregious, as feeble Natalis Comes interpreteth it; nor simply "vehemens," as the common Latin version saith better, but implying the combination of force and terror. "From the god of sounding waves, Shaker of earth, and Amphitrite, sprang (excellently rendered, that) Beneath the deep He dwells in golden edifice, (but with his father and mother, quoth Hesiod), A god Of awful might.* Mr. Elton appends a curious note to this passage, from the learned and ingenious, but most gratuitous, "Mythology "of Bryant; who, out of a mistaken zeal for identifying every thing with Scripture, undoes half the poetry of old fable "at a jerk," and makes stocks and stones of the gods with a vengeance. We are sorry to find that so poetical a translator has allowed himself, out of a like respectable error, to contract his larger instincts into those of a dogmatist so prosaical. According to Mr. Bryant, Triton is no better than an old brick building; and Amphitrite herself "another." "The Hetrurians," says he, "erected on their shores towers and beacons for the sake of their navigation, which they called Tor-ain; whence they had a still farther denomination of Tor-aini (Tyrrheni). Another name for buildings of this nature was Tirit, or Turit; which signified a tower or turret. The name of Triton is a contraction of Tirit-on, and signifies the tower of the sun; but a deity was framed from it, who was supposed to have had the appearance of a man upwards, but downwards to have been like a fish. The Hetrurians are thought to have been the inventors of trumpets; and in their towers on the sea-coast there were people appointed to be continually on the watch, both by day and by night, and to give a proper signal if any thing happened extraordinary. This was done by a blast from the trumpet. In early times, however, these brazen instruments were but little known; and people were obliged to use what were near at hand, the *Elton's "Hesiod," p. 194. conchs of the sea: by sounding these they gave signals from the tops of the towers when any ship appeared; and this is the implement with which Triton is more commonly furnished. Amphi-tirit is merely an oracular tower, which, by the poets, has been changed into Amphitrite, and made the wife of Neptune." Don't believe a word of it; or, if you do, admit the possibility of just enough to enable you to admire how the noble imagination of the Greeks restored their rights to the largeness and loudness of Nature, and forced this watchman's tower back again into the ocean which it pretended to compete with. What was the sea itself nothing? its roaring nothing? its magnitude, and mystery, and eternal motion nothing, that out of all this a Triton and a Neptune could not be framed, without the help of these restorers of Babel? Bochart, speaking of the river Triton (and, by the way,· he was an Eastern scholar, which Bryant was not), derives the name from the Phoenician word tarit. Mr. Bryant brings his Triton from tirit. In fact you may bring any thing from any thing by the help of etymology; as Goldsmith has shown in his famous derivation of Fohi from Noah; and Horne Tooke, in his no less learned deduction of "pickled cucumber” from “King Jeremiah." To pretend to come to any certain conclusion in etymology, is to defy time, place, and vicissitude. Allegorically, Triton is the noise, and tumbling, and savageness of the sea; and therefore may well be represented as looking more brutal than human; but the savageness of the sea, taking it in the gross, and not the particular, is a thing genial and good-natured, serving the healthiest purposes of the world; and therefore the same Triton may be represented as abounding in humanity, and appearing in a nobler shape. Be his shape what it may, Venus (universal love) understands his nature; and with the eye of a goddess sees fair-play between him and what is beauteous, difference being only a form, and the elements and essences of things being the same throughout the globe, and secretly harmonizing with one another. (There is a fine blowing wind, while we are writing this, with a deep tone in its cadences, as if Triton were assenting to what we wrote.) Boccaccio, in identifying him with the noise of the sea, finally says, that he signifies that especial sound of it which announces a more than ordinary swell of the waters, and the approach of his lord and master in his vehemence, "as trumpeters blow their song before the coming of an emperor." ""* But allegories are secondary affairs. Triton is a good fellow on his own account, and puts a merriment and visible humanity in the sea, linking us also with things invisible. On this latter account, a living poet, in a fit of tedium with the commonplaces of the "work-a-day world," and their habitual disbelief in any thing beyond themselves, has expressed a wish to see him. But surely, being the great poet he is, he has seen him, often ; and need not 1; have desponded for a moment over the commonplaces of the world, more than over any other parcel of atoms playing their parts in the vicissitudes and progress of all things. "Great God!" he exclaims (and beautiful is the effusion): *"Genealogia Deorum," 1511, p. 55. "Voluere ex illo sono comprehendi futurum maris majorem solito æstum; ut sono illo adventante majori cum impetu dominum suum ostendat Triton; uti et tibicines imperatorem de proximo advenire designant tibiarum cantu." Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; WORDSWORTH'S SONNETS. -no But what is there more marvellous in Triton than in the sea itself? and what glimpses need we desire to reassure us, greater than the stars above our heads, and the wonders in a man's own brain and bosom? To see these, if we look for them, in a healthy spirit, (for the gods, after all, or rather before all, love health and energy, and insist upon them), is to see "the shapes of gods, ascending and descending,” and to know them for what they are delusions, nor unbeneficent. All that they require is, that we should help the intellectual and moral world to make progress; and as our poet was not doing this at the moment, we suppose the gods suspended his gift, and would not allow him to see them. And yet, behold! he did so, in the midst of his very disbelief! so unable to get rid of his divinity is a true poet. "In playful reverence, not presumptuous scorn I speak, nor with my own rebuke, but Jove's, Our old friend Sandys, in the delightful notes to his "Ovid," quotes an Italian author to show that a Triton was once seen and felt, as you might handle a lobster. "Pliny," says he, "writes how an ambassador was sent on purpose from the Olissiponensi (the Lisbon people), unto Tiberius Cæsar, to tell him of a Triton, seene and heard in a certaine cave, winding a shell, and in such a form as they are commonly painted. But I cannot omit what is written by Alexander ab Alexandro, who lived in the last century, how he heard one Draconet Boniface of Naples, a souldier of much experience, report in an honour |
