silken damask: the same thread runs through
the web, but it makes part of different figures. Joined with other
colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or
light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different
directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes
you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald--they being all
the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are
interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to
explain in any order. Thus the Harpies, as they represent vain desire,
are connected with the Sirens, who are the spirits of constant desire; so
that it is difficult sometimes in early art to know which are meant, both
being represented alike as birds with women's heads; only the Sirens are
the great constant desires--the infinite sicknesses of heart--which,
rightly placed, give life, and wrongly placed, waste it away; so that
there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is
fatal. But there are no animating or saving Harpies; their nature is
always vexing and full of weariness, and thus they are curiously
connected with the whole group of legends about Tantalus.

33.* We all know what it is to be tantalized; but we do not often think
of asking what Tantalus was tantalized for--what he had done, to be
forever kept hungry in sight of food. Well; he had not been condemned to
this merely for being a glutton. By Dante the same punishment is
assigned to simple gluttony, to purge it away; but the sins of Tantalus
were of a much wider and more mysterious kind. There are four great sins
attributed to him: one, stealing the food of the gods to give it to men;
another, sacrificing his son to feed the gods themselves (it may remind
you for a moment of what I was telling you of the earthly character of
Demeter, that, while the other gods all refuse, she, dreaming about her
lost daughter, eats part of the shoulder of Pelops before she knows what
she is doing); another sin is, telling the secrets of the gods; and only
the fourth--stealing the golden dog of Pandareos--is connected with
gluttony. The special sense of this myth is marked by Pandareos
receiving the happy privilege of never being troubled with indigestion;
the dog, in general, however mythically represents all utter senseless
and carnal desires; mainly that of gluttony; and in the mythic sense of
Hades--that is to say,