And now, dear Nymphs, while the hot sun is high
Darting his influence right upon the plain,
Let us all sit beneath the narrow shade
That noontide Etna casts.—And, Ino, sweet,
Come hither; and while idling thus we rest,
Repeat in verses sweet the tale which says
How great Prometheus from Apollo’s car
Stole heaven’s fire—a God-like gift for Man!
Or the more pleasing tale of Aphrodite;
How she arose from the salt Ocean’s foam,
And sailing in her pearly shell, arrived
On Cyprus sunny shore, where myrtles[[2]] bloomed
And sweetest flowers, to welcome Beauty’s Queen;
And ready harnessed on the golden sands
Stood milk-white doves linked to a sea-shell car,
With which she scaled the heavens, and took her seat
Among the admiring Gods.
EUNOE.
Proserpine’s tale
Is sweeter far than Ino’s sweetest aong.
PROSERPINA.
Ino, you knew erewhile a River-God,
Who loved you well and did you oft entice
To his transparent waves and flower-strewn banks.
He loved high poesy and wove sweet sounds,
And would sing to you as you sat reclined
On the fresh grass beside his shady cave,
From which clear waters bubbled, dancing forth,
And spreading freshness in the noontide air.
When you returned you would enchant our ears
With tales and songs which did entice the fauns,[[3]]
With Pan their King from their green haunts, to hear.
Tell me one now, for like the God himself,
Tender they were and fanciful, and wrapt
The hearer in sweet dreams of shady groves,
Blue skies, and clearest, pebble-paved streams.
INO.
I will repeat the tale which most I loved;
Which tells how lily-crowned Arethusa,
Your favourite Nymph, quitted her native Greece,
Flying the liquid God Alpheus, who followed,
Cleaving the desarts of the pathless deep,
And rose in Sicily, where now she flows
The clearest spring of Enna’s gifted plain.
(By Shelley)[[4]]
Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows,
In the Acroceraunian mountains,—
From cloud, and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks
With her rainbow locks,
Streaming among the streams,—
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine,
Which slopes to the Western gleams:—
And gliding and springing,
She went, ever singing
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
Then Alpheus bold
On his glacier cold,
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks;—with the spasm
All Erymanthus shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below:—
And the beard and the hair
Of the river God were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
Oh, save me! oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!
The loud ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer[,]
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam,
Behind her descended
Her billows unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream:—
Like a gloomy stain
On the Emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind,
As an eagle pursueing
A dove to its ruin,
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearled thrones,
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams,
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light,
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest’s[[5]] night:—
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword fish dark,
Under the Ocean foam,[[6]]
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts,
They passed to their Dorian Home.
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted,
Grown single hearted
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill[,—]
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel,—
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;—
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky,
When they love, but live no more.