Saving, some flighty fragments of the world, By turns they sink, by turns their music raise, Among the rest, with plumes of various dyes, In vain the spring returns, the spring no more He ceas'd th' approving choir with joy renew The feather'd nations take their amorous fill. The earth and streams one soul appears to move, Through these alluring scenes of magic power Off in a tangent; Made such a harem, Centrifugal range on't; A langour seem'd diffus'd o'er all her frame, All this the warriors from the shade survey, They lost the centripetal action The lover ceas'd; the fair Armida smil'd, Not half so proud, of glorious plumage vain, Repulses sweet, soft speech, and gay desires, Now with a kiss, the balmy pledge of love, [12]" There's Captain Jason had some pulls," &c.-See p. 42. Jason, commander of the Argonautæ, a name given to those ancient heroes who went with him on board the ship Argo to Colchis, about seventy-nine years before the taking of Troy, or B. C. 1263. The causes of this expedition arose from the following circumstance :-Athamas, king of Thebes, had married Ino, the daughter of Cadmus, whom he divorced to marry Nephele, by whom he had two children, Phryxus and Helle. As Nephele was subject to certain fits of madness, Athamas repudiated her, and took a second time Ino, by whom he had soon after two sons, Learchus and Melicerta. As the children of Nephele were to succeed to So took up lodgings at the moon ; their father by right of birth, Ino conceived an immortal hatred against them, and she caused the city of Thebes to be visited by a pestilence, by poisoning all the grain which had been sown in the earth. Upon this the oracle was consulted, and as it had been corrupted by means of Ino, the answer was, that Nephele's children should be immolated to the gods. Phryxus was apprised of this, and he immediately embarked with his sister Helle, and fled to the court of Etes, king of Colchis, one of his near relations. In the voyage Helle died, and Phryxus arrived safe at Colchis, and was received with kindness by the king. The poets have embellished the flight of Phryxus, by supposing that he and Helle fled through the air on a ram which had a golden fleece and wings, and was endowed with the faculties of speech. This ram, as they say, was the offspring of Neptune's amours, under the form of a ram, with the nymph Theophane. As they were going to be sacrificed, the ram took them on his back, and instantly disappeared in the air. On their way Helle was giddy, and fell into that part of the sea which from her was called the Hellespont. When Phryxus came to Colchis, he sacrificed the ram to Jupiter, or, according to others, to Mars, to whom he also dedicated the golden fleece. He soon after married Chalciope the daughter of Etes; but his father-in-law envied him the possession of the golden fleece, and therefore to obtain it he murdered him. Some time after this event, when Jason the son of Æson, demanded of his uncle Pelias the crown which he usurped, Pelias said that he would restore it to him, provided he avenged the death of their common relation Phryxus, whom Ætes had basely murdered in Colchis. Jason, who was in the vigour of youth, and of an ambitious soul, cheerfully undertook the expedition, and embarked with all the young princes of Greece in the ship Argo. They stopped at the Island of Lemnos, where they remained two years, and raised a new race of men from the Lemnian women who had murdered their husbands. After they had left Lemnos, they visited Samothrace, where they offered sacrifices to the gods, and thence passed to Troas and to Cyzicum. Here they met At even your optic glasses end, with a favourable reception from Cyzicus the king of the country. The night after their departure, they were driven back by a storm again on the coast of Cyzicum, and the inhabitants and the Argonauts, taking each other for enemies, furiously attacked each other. In this unfortunate nocturnal engagement, the slaughter was great; and when morning showed them their irretrievable mistake, their reciprocal lamentations were equally so the king Cyzicus was among the slain-his queen immediately followed, by a violent death from her own hand. The funeral obsequies and inconsolable grief, is described most pathetically, and given in the notes following the text, in the Chapter of Laments, where the tears of those who weep are turned into perpetual streamlets, as in the case of Niobe, petrified to marble, "Where fix'd she stands upon a bleaky hill, And down her marble cheeks eternal tears distil." From Cyzicum they visited Bebrycia, otherwise called Bithynia, where Pollux accepted the challenge of Amycus king of the country, in the combat of the cestus, and slew him. They were driven from Bebrycia by a storm, to Salmydessa, on the coast of Thrace, where they delivered Phineus, king of the place, from the persecution of the Harpies. Phineus directed their course through the Cynean rock or the Symplegades, and they safely entered the Euxine sea. They visited the country of the Mariandinians, where Lycus reigned, and lost two of their companions, Idmon, and Tiphys their pilot. After they had left this coast, they were driven upon the Island of Arecia, where they found the children of Phryxus; whom Etes their grandfather had sent to Greece to take possession of their father's kingdom. From this Island they at last arrived safe in Æa, the capital of Colchis. Jason explained the cause of his voyage to Etes; but the conditions on which he was to recover the golden fleece, were so hard, that the Argonauts must have perished in the attempt, had not Medea, the king's daughter, fallen in love with their leader. She had a conference with Jason, and after mutual oaths of fidelity in the temple of Hecate, Medea |