with their whirling motion, which is indeed indicative of the most destructive winds; and they are thus related to the nobler tempests, as Charybdis to the sea; they are devouring and desolating, making all things disappear that come in their grasp; and so, spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meager and insane,—­ spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope.  So you have, on the one side, the winds of prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness.  Understand that, once, deeply,—­any who have ever known the weariness of vain desires, the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling famine and thirst of heart,—­and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy Celaeno’s shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the “Inferno,” the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the trees that are the souls of suicides.

22.  Now you must always be prepared to read Greek legends as you trace threads through figures on a silken damask:  the same thread runs through the web, but it makes part of different figures.  Joined with other colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or light.  Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald—­they being all the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to explain in any order.  Thus the Harpies, as they represent vain desire, are connected with the Sirens, who are the spirits of constant desire; so that it is difficult sometimes in early art to know which are meant, both being represented alike as birds with women’s heads; only the Sirens are the great constant desires—­the infinite sicknesses of heart—­which, rightly placed, give life, and wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is fatal.  But there are no animating or saving Harpies; their nature is always vexing and full of weariness, and thus they are curiously connected with the whole group of legends about Tantalus.

33.* We all know what it is to be tantalized; but we do not often think of asking what Tantalus was tantalized for—­what he had done, to be forever kept hungry in sight of food.  Well; he had not been condemned to this merely for being a glutton.  By Dante the same punishment is assigned to simple gluttony, to purge it away; but the sins of Tantalus were of a much wider and more mysterious kind.  There are four great sins attributed to him:  one, stealing the food of the gods to give it to men; another, sacrificing his son to feed the gods themselves (it may remind you for a moment of what I was telling you of the earthly character of