ting island. Secondly, you hear that all
treasures were laid up in them; therefore, you know this AEolus is lord of
the beneficent winds ("he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries"); and
presently afterwards Homer calls him the "steward" of the winds, the
master of the store-house of them. And this idea of gifts and
preciousness in the winds of heaven is carried out in the well-known
sequel of the fable: AEolus gives them to Ulysses, all but one, bound in
leathern bags, with a glittering cord of silver; and so like bags of
treasure that the sailors think they are so, and open them to see. And
when Ulysses is thus driven back to AEolus, and prays him again to help
him, note the deliberate words of the king's refusal,--"Did I not," says
he, "send thee on thy way heartily, that thou mightest reach thy country,
thy home, and whatever is dear to thee? It is not lawful for me again
to send forth favorably on his journey a man hated by the happy gods."
This idea of the beneficence of AEolus remains to the latest times, though
Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the cloud island into Lipari,
has lost it a little; but even when it is finally explained away by
Diodorus, AEolus is still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on the coast
of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and established a system of storm
signals.

20. Another beneficent storm-power, Boreas, occupies an important place
in early legend, and a singularly principal one in art; and I wish I
could read to you a passage of Plato about the legend of Boreas and
Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of the Ilissus--notwithstannding its
severe reflection upon persons who waste their time on mythological
studies; but I must go on at once to the fable with which you are all
generally familiar, that of the Harpies.

* Translated by Max Mueller in the opening of his essay on "Comparative
Mythology."--Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii.

This is always connected with that of Boreas or the north wind, because
the two sons of Boreas are enemies of the Harpies, and drive them away
into frantic flight. The myth in its first literal form means only the
battle between the fair north wind and the foul south one: the two
Harpies, "Stormswift" and "Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rainbow;
that is to say, they are the broken drifts of the showery south wind, and
the clear north wind drives them back; but they quickly take a deeper and
more malignant significance.