The daughter of the snow overheard, and left the hall of her secret sigh.  She came in all her beauty, like the moon from the cloud of the east.  Loveliness was around her as light.  Her step was like the music of songs.  She saw the youth, and loved him.  He was the stolen sigh of her soul.  Her blue eyes rolled in secret on him, and she blessed the chief of Morven.—­Ossian ("Fingal,” iii.)

AGANIP’PE (4 syl.), fountain of the Muses, at the foot of mount Helicon, in Boeo’tia.

  From Helicon’s harmonious springs
  A thousand rills their mazy progress take.

Gray, Progress of Poetry.

AG’APE (3 syl.) the fay.  She had three sons at a birth, Primond, Diamond, and Triamond.  Being anxious to know the future lot of her sons, she went to the abyss of Demogorgon, to consult the “Three Fatal Sisters.”  Clotho showed her the threads, which “were thin as those spun by a spider.”  She begged the fates to lengthen the life-threads, but they said this could not be; they consented, however, to this agreement—­

  When ye shred with fatal knife
  His line which is the eldest of the three,
  Eftsoon his life may pass into the next: 
  And when the next shall likewise ended be,
  That both their lives may likewise be annext
  Unto the third, that his may so be trebly wext.

  Spenser, Faery Queen, iv. 2 (1590).

AGAPI’DA (Fray Antonio), the imaginary chronicler of The Conquest of Granada, written by Washington Irving (1829).

AGAST’YA (3 syl.), a dwarf who drank the sea dry.  As he was walking one day with Vishnoo, the insolent ocean asked the god who the pigmy was that strutted by his side.  Vishnoo replied it was the patriarch Agastya, who was going to restore earth to its true balance.  Ocean, in contempt, spat its spray in the pigmy’s face, and the sage, in revenge of this affront, drank the waters of the ocean, leaving the bed quite dry.—­Maurice.

AG’ATHA, daughter of Cuno, and the betrothed of Max, in Weber’s opera of Der Freischuetz.—­See Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

AGATH’OCLES (4 syl.) tyrant of Sicily.  He was the son of a potter, and raised himself from the ranks to become general of the army.  He reduced all Sicily under his power.  When he attacked the Carthaginians, he burnt his ships that his soldiers might feel assured they must either conquer or die.  Agathocles died of poison administered by his grandson (B.C. 361-289).

Voltaire has a tragedy called Agathocle, and Caroline Pichler has an excellent German novel entitled Agathocles.

AGATHON, the hero and title of a philosophic romance, by C. M. Wieland (1733-1813).  This is considered the best of his novels, though some prefer his Don Sylvia de Rosalva.

AGDISTES, the name given by Spenser to our individual consciousness or self.  Personified in the being who presided over the Acrasian “bowre of blis.”