You know the short, violent, spiral gusts
that lift the dust before coming rain: the Harpies get identified first
with these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so they are called
"Harpies," "the Snatchers," and are thought of as entirely destructive;
their manner of destroying being twofold,--by snatching away, and by
defiling and polluting. This is a month in which you may really see a
small Harpy at her work almost whenever you choose. The first time that
there is threatening of rain after two or three days of fine weather,
leave your window well open to the street, and some books or papers on
the table; and if you do not, in a little while, know what the Harpies
mean, and how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll give up my Greek
myths.

21. That is the physical meaning. It is now easy to find the mental
one. You must all have felt the expression of ignoble anger in those
fitful gusts of storm. There is a sense of provocation in their thin
and senseless fury, wholly different from the nobler anger of the greater
tempests. Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the Greek thinks of
them always as vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the Sons of
Boreas, who are kindly winds, that fill sails, and wave harvests,--full
of bracing health and happy impulses. From this lower and merely greater
terror, always associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed
indicative of the most destructive winds; and they are thus related to
the nobler tempests, as Charybdis to the sea; they are devouring and
desolating, making all things disappear that come in their grasp; and so,
spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion,
vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meager and insane,--
spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine,
and unsatisfied hope. So you have, on the one side, the winds of
prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness. Understand
that, once, deeply,--any who have ever known the weariness of vain
desires, the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling famine and
thirst of heart,--and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy
Celaeno's shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the
"Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the
trees that are the souls of suicides.

22. Now you must always be prepared to read Greek legends as you trace
threads through figures on a