And climbs the stalks to get a little ease.

The House-carrier is the snail, of course; and he shuns the heat of
the ground, not the Pleiades. Here again is a maxim deeply involved in
language:

When 'tis a god's high feast let not your knife
Cut off the withered from the quick with life,
Upon the five-brancht stock--

or, in other words, never cut your finger-nails on a holy day.

Hesiod, by birth an Æolian, was by settlement a Boeotian. He lived and
farmed his own land on the slopes of Helikon, under the governance of
the lords of Thespiæ, whoever they were. I have been to Thespiæ, and
certify that there are no lords there now. I saw little but fleas and
dogs of incredible savagery, where once were the precinct and shrine
of Eros with a famous statue of the god by Praxiteles. It is not far
from the Valley of the Muses, where or whereabouts those fair ladies
met with Hesiod, and, as we are told in the Theogony, plucked him a
rod of olive, a thing of wonder,

And breath'd in me a voice divine and clear
To sing the things that shall be, are, and were.

Also they told him to sing of the blessed gods,

But ever of themselves both first and last,

and he obeyed them. When he won a tripod at Chalkis, in a singing