o the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen
that toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pherae.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had
been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
with fruitfulness and gladness--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
doom of all unspent ages--he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here
beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io paean sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
Leto's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang for ever with the name of
Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honoured
him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his
bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of
fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he laboured here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at
his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a
slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his
keen eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the
herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even thine
own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to
me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to
my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing
the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
and watery sunlight lit up the form of th