So did the god make music.
And all that night he sat by the swift-flowing river, and the music from his pipe of reeds was so sweet and yet so passing sad, that it seemed as though the very heart of the earth itself were telling of its sadness. Thus Syrinx still lives—still dies:
“A note of music by its own breath slain,
Blown tenderly from the frail heart of a reed,”
and as the evening light comes down on silent places and the trembling shadows fall on the water, we can hear her mournful whisper through the swaying reeds, brown and silvery-golden, that grow by lonely lochan and lake and river.
THE DEATH OF ADONIS
“The fairest youth that ever maiden’s dream conceived.”
Lewis Morris.
The ideally beautiful woman, a subject throughout the centuries for all the greatest powers of sculptor’s and painter’s art, is Venus, or Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and of love. And he who shares with her an unending supremacy of perfection of form is not one of the gods, her equals, but a mortal lad, who was the son of a king.