bow of forest leaves dying.

And, last, he showed me the rainbow of blood. It was but the
three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it
cast its measured bars, for ever recognizable now to human sight, on
the chord of the seven colors. And no drop of that red rain can now be
shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice
of it heard out of the ground.

166. But the seeing these flower colors, and the iris of blood
together with them, just while I was trying to gather into brief space
the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of
long ago, that even the trees of the earth were "capable of a kind of
sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and
along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shades only
where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase;
amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid
the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the
lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at
sunset."

And so also now this chance word of the daily journal, about the
Sirens, brought to my mind the divine passage in the Cratylus of
Plato, about the place of the dead.

"And none of those who dwell there desire to depart thence,--no, not
even the Sirens; but even they, the seducers, are there themselves
beguiled, and they who lulled all men, themselves laid to rest--they,
and all others--such sweet songs doth death know how to sing to them."

So also the Hebrew.

"And desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home." For you
know I told you the Sirens were not pleasures, but desires; being
always represented in old Greek art as having human faces, with birds'
wings and feet; and sometimes with eyes upon their wings; and there
are not two more important passages in all literature, respecting the
laws of labor and of life, than those two great descriptions of the
Sirens in Homer and Plato,--the Sirens of death, and Sirens of eternal
life, representing severally the earthly and heavenly desires of men;
the heavenly desires singing to the motion of circles of the spheres,
and the earthly on the rocks of fatalest shipwreck. A fact which may
indeed be regarded "sentimentally," but it is also a profoundly
important politico-economical one.

And now for Shakespeare's song.

167. You will find, if you look back to the analysis of it, given in