No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell"
In Cowper's poem of "Yardley Oak" there are some beautiful
mythological allusions. The former of the two following is to the
fable of Castor and Pollux; the latter is more appropriate to our
present subject. Addressing the acorn he says:
"Thou fell'st mature; and in the loamy clod,
Swelling with vegetative force instinct,
Didst burst thine, as theirs the fabled Twins
Now stars; twor lobes protruding, paired exact;
A leaf succeede and another leaf,
And, all the elements thy puny growth
Fostering propitious, thou becam'st a twig.
Who lived when thou wast such? Of couldst thou speak,
As in Dodona once thy kindred trees
Oracular, I would not curious ask
The future, best unknown, but at thy mouth
Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past."
Tennyson, in his "Talking Oak," alludes to the oaks of Dodona in
these lines:
And I will work in prose and rhyme,
And praise thee more in both
Than bard has honored beech or lime,
Or that Thessalian growth
In which the swarthy ring-dove sat
And mystic sentence spoke; etc.
Byron alludes to the oracle of Delphi where, speaking of Rousseau,
whose writings he conceives did much to bring on the French
revolution, he says:
"For the, he was inspired, and from him came,
As from the Pythian's mystic cave of yore,
Those oracles which set the world in flame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more.
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