‘Orpheus! what ruin hath thy frenzy wroughtOn me, alas! and thee? Lo! once againThe unpitying fates recall me, and dark sleepCloses my swimming eyes. And now farewell:Girt with enormous night I am borne away,Outstretching toward thee, thine, alas! no more,These helpless hands.’ She spake, and suddenly,Like smoke dissolving into empty air,Passed and was sundered from his sight; nor himClutching vain shadows, yearning sore to speak,Thenceforth beheld she, nor no second timeHell's boatman brooks he pass the watery bar.What should he do? fly whither, twice bereaved?Move with what tears the Manes, with what voiceThe Powers of darkness? She indeed even nowDeath-cold was floating on the Stygian barge!For seven whole months unceasingly, men say,Beneath a skyey crag, by thy lone wave,Strymon, he wept, and in the caverns chillUnrolled his story, melting tigers' hearts,And leading with his lay the oaks along.As in the poplar-shade a nightingaleMourns her lost young, which some relentless swain,Spying, from the nest has torn unfledged, but sheWails the long night, and perched upon a sprayWith sad insistence pipes her dolorous strain,Till all the region with her wrongs o'erflows.No love, no new desire, constrained his soul:By snow-bound Tanais and the icy north,Far steppes to frost Rhipaean forever wed,Alone he wandered, lost EurydiceLamenting, and the gifts of Dis ungiven.Scorned by which tribute the Ciconian dames,Amid their awful Bacchanalian ritesAnd midnight revellings, tore him limb from limb,And strewed his fragments over the wide fields.Then too, even then, what time the Hebrus stream,Oeagrian Hebrus, down mid-current rolled,Rent from the marble neck, his drifting head,The death-chilled tongue found yet a voice to cry‘Eurydice! ah! poor Eurydice!’With parting breath he called her, and the banksFrom the broad stream caught up ‘Eurydice!’” So Proteus ending plunged into the deep,And, where he plunged, beneath the eddying whirlChurned into foam the water, and was gone;But not Cyrene, who unquestioned thusBespake the trembling listener: “Nay, my son,From that sad bosom thou mayst banish care:Hence came that plague of sickness, hence the nymphs,With whom in the tall woods the dance she wove,Wrought on thy bees, alas! this deadly bane.Bend thou before the Dell-nymphs, gracious powers:Bring gifts, and sue for pardon: they will grantPeace to thine asking, and an end of wrath.But how to approach them will I first unfold—Four chosen bulls of peerless form and bulk,That browse to-day the green Lycaean heights,Pick from thy herds, as many kine to match,Whose necks the yoke pressed never: then for theseBuild up four altars by the lofty fanes,And from their throats let gush the victims' blood,And in the greenwood leave their bodies lone.Then, when the ninth dawn hath displayed its beams,To Orpheus shalt thou send his funeral dues,Poppies of Lethe, and let slay a sheepCoal-black, then seek the grove again, and soonFor pardon found adore EurydiceWith a slain calf for victim.”
No delay:The self-same hour he hies him forth to doHis mother's bidding: to the shrine he came,The appointed altars reared, and thither ledFour chosen bulls of peerless form and bulk,With kine to match, that never yoke had known;Then, when the ninth dawn had led in the day,To Orpheus sent his funeral dues, and soughtThe grove once more. But sudden, strange to tellA portent they espy: through the oxen's flesh,Waxed soft in dissolution, hark! there humBees from the belly; the rent ribs overboilIn endless clouds they spread them, till at lastOn yon tree-top together fused they cling,And drop their cluster from the bending boughs.
So sang I of the tilth of furrowed fields,Of flocks and trees, while Caesar's majestyLaunched forth the levin-bolts of war by deepEuphrates, and bare rule o'er willing folkThough vanquished, and essayed the heights of heaven.I Virgil then, of sweet ParthenopeThe nursling, wooed the flowery walks of peaceInglorious, who erst trilled for shepherd-wightsThe wanton ditty, and sang in saucy youthThee, Tityrus, 'neath the spreading beech tree's shade.