Nympholepsy, Mythopoesis, and John Addington Symonds

meaning of the word nympholepsy has drifted in recent years towards n rrowly er tic sense. In 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary defined nymp holepsy as a state of rapture supposed to be inspired in men by nymphs; hence, an ecstasy or frenzy of emotion, esp. that inspired by something unattainable. In 2004, this meaning was supplemented by further sense of passion or desire aroused in men by young girls. In the nineteenth century, the latter, sexual meaning was unknown, and nympholepsy signified much wider and more general desire. In fact, it named spiritual condition that was one of the most important legacies of the European classical heritage to Romantic and Victorian writers: the yearning for mythopoeic connection with the natural world, coupled with the alienated sense that such connection was no longer possible. Just as Nabokov was largely responsible for the late twentieth-century under standing of nympholepsy as specific kind of sexual desire or disorder, it was Byron who established the characteristically nineteenth-century usage of the term to denote an aesthetic, emotional, or spiritual longing for unattainable beauty, love, or harmony. first nineteenth-century example given by the Oxford English Dictionary is Byron's description, in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, of the goddess Egeria as a young Aurora of the air, / nympholepsy of some fond despair ( 181 ; IV. 115-). In his stanzas on Egeria, Byron turned the classical idea of the madness induced in men by the sighting of nymph into meta phor for the condition of alienated modernity. This Byronic understanding of nympholepsy was further developed by the Victorian essayist, historian, and travel writer John Addington Symonds. In two essays of southern travel, The Cornice (1874) and Amalfi, Paestum, Capri (1879), mythological encoun ters between men and nymphs provide focal points for Symonds s meditations on the ancient mythopoeic connection with nature and the unattainability of that connection in the modern world. Byron's stanzas on the springs of Egeria outside Rome in Canto IV, stanzas 115?19, constitute one of several exercises in the interpretation of genius loci that take place in the course of Childe Harold's pilgrimage. Byron calls the

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