THE DELUGE OF DEUCALION.

Deucalion is represented as the son of Prometheus, and is styled
the father of the Greek nation of post-diluvian times. When Jupiter
determined to destroy the human race on account of its impiety,
it was his first design, OVID tells us, to accomplish it with fire.
But his own safety demanded the employment of a less dangerous
agency.

Already had Jove tossed the flaming brand,
And rolled the thunder in his spacious hand,
Preparing to discharge on seas and land;
But stopped, for fear, thus violently driven,
The sparks should catch his axle-tree of heaven--
Remembering, in the Fates, a time when fire
Should to the battlements of heaven aspire,
And all his blazing worlds above should burn,
And all the inferior globe to cinders turn.
His dire artillery thus dismissed, he bent
His thoughts to some securer punishment;
Concludes to pour a watery deluge down,
And what he durst not burn resolves to drown.

In all this myth, it will be seen, Jupiter may very properly be
considered as a personification of the elemental strife that
drowned a guilty world. Deucalion, warned, by his father, of the
coming deluge, thereupon made himself an ark or skiff, and, putting
provisions into it, entered it with his wife, Pyrrha. The whole