224 TAME SWAN. Class U, 



Wheel round the island, caroling mean time 



Soft melody, the favourites of the Nine, 



Thus ushering to birth with dulcet sounds 



The God of harmony, and hence sev'n strings 



Hereafter to his golden lyre he gave. 



For ere the eighth soft concert was begun 



He sprung to birth. Dod^s Callhnaclius, p. 115. 



Upon this idea of their being peculiarly conse- 

 crated to Apollo and the Muses, (the deities of 

 harmony) seems to have been ingrafted the no- 

 tion the antients had of swans being endowed 

 with a musical voice. Though this might be one 

 reason for the fable, yet, to us there appears 

 another still stronger, which arose from the Py- 

 thagorean doctrine of the transmigration of the 

 soul into the bodies of animals ; from the belief, 

 that the body of the sv/an was allotted for the 

 mansion of departed poets. Thus P/«/o makes his 



prophet say, ihiv ,asv ya^ ^!J%>)v zf-ri tr,v irors 0§<psojs 

 ysvoptjevYiV v.vuvov ^lov ai^ovixsyr^v'^ . " I saw the SOul 



. of Orpheus prefer the life of a swan." 



After the antients had thus furnished these 

 birds with such agreeable inmates, it is not to be 

 doubted but they would attribute to them the 

 same powers of harmony, that poets possessed, 

 previous to their transmigration ; but the vulgar 

 not distinguishing between the sweetness of num- 

 bers, and that of voice, ignorantly believed that 



■-: : .,; * De RepitlL Lib.'K. suh^ne. 



