preciousness in the winds of heaven is carried out in the well-known
sequel of the fable: Æolus 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 Æolus, 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 Æolus 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, Æolus 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 Müller 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