The hair is hung up in
the temple: in a day or two after it has vanished. Dire is the wrath
of Ptolemy, the consternation of the priests, the scandal to religion;
when Conon, the court-astronomer, luckily searching the heavens, finds
the missing tresses in an utterly unexpected place--as a new
constellation of stars, which to this day bears the title of Coma
Berenices. It is so convenient to believe the fact, that everybody
believes it accordingly; and Callimachus writes an elegy thereon, in
which the constellified, or indeed deified tresses, address in most
melodious and highly-finished Greek, bedizened with concetto on
concetto, that fair and sacred head whereon they grew, to be shorn from
which is so dire a sorrow, that apotheosis itself can hardly reconcile
them to the parting.
Worthy, was not all this, of the descendants of the men who fought at
Marathon and Thermopylae? The old Greek civilisation was rotting
swiftly down; while a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in
that unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined to burn up that
dead world, and all its works.
Callimachus's hymns, those may read who list. They are highly finished
enough; the work of a man who knew thoroughly what sort of article he
intended to make, and what were the most approved methods of making it.
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