Athens. Progne was married to Tereus, king of Thrace. After some time, she expressed a wish to see her sister; npon which Tereus went to Athens to fetch her, but conceiving a criminal passion for her on the road, he ravished her; and to prevent her disclosing the horrid deed, cut out her tongue, and imprisoned her in a lone castle, in a wood; telling her sister on his return, that she had died on the road. Philomela, however, contrived to work her melancholy story in a web, or embroidery, and had it conveyed to Progne, who became enraged to such a pitch of fury, that she killed her own son Itys, and served up a part of him, as a dish to her husband, on bis return from hunting. Tereus having feasted heartily upon it, asked to see his son, on which Progne produced the bloody head, and threw it in his face. This tragical affair ended by Tereus being changed into a screech-owl, Progne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale. See Ovid's Metamorphoses.
P. 72. From this little poem might be drawn a very sublime philosophical speculation. Nature appears to act in a circle. Nothing is lost, nothing new is produced. The individuals perish, the species remain. The destruction of one body is the reproduction of another. Generation springs from the centre of corruption.
Ceaseless vicissitude and revolution
Pervade the universe.
The earth, the atmosphere, and the waters, are one immense laboratory, in which a series of compositions and decompositions is perpetually carried on. The quickening energy of the sun, the fountain of light and life, pervades every combination of matter. Magnetism, and attraction, electricity, and galvanism, are his subordinate agents. The moon, and the other heavenly bodies, exert an influence on our globe; our globe in return has a re-action upon them. The various meteors, and other phenomena of the atmosphere, even the fiery tail of the comet, are supposed by many philosophers to owe their origin to vapours and exhalations from our earth. The supposition of the poet, therefore, though fanciful, is not extravagant. From the ashes of a plant manuring the soil, might
