James Thomson in the Seasons ('Winter'), The 

 say of ' Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted ^ ain J 

 year,' the constellation is more associated with 

 the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in 

 mid-February to mid-March, that, following 

 its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters 

 it — so that ' benign ' and not ' fierce ' becomes 

 the apt epithet. 



All these 'watery constellations' — Aquarius, 

 Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces 

 — are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in 

 the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, 

 that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these 

 winter-months are known to all of us, where 

 they flash and dance south-east of the Silver 

 Apples of childhood's sky — the clustered 

 Pleiades. They have become the typical 

 stars of the onset of winter — the Lords of 

 Rain — 'sad companions of the turning year' 

 as an old Roman poet calls them, ' the seaman- 

 noted Hyades' of Euripides, 'the Boar- 

 Throng' (feeders on the mast brought down 

 in late October and November by the 

 autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, 

 the 'Storm-Star ' of Pliny, the Moist Daughters 

 of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in 

 Tennyson's 



" Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

 Vext the dim sea." 



287 



