When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth
Devious through Heaven’s affrighted signs his sire’s
Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled
From th’ empyrean headlong to the gulf
Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep
Even now the sister trees their amber tears
O’er Phaëton untimely dead.”
In the beautiful lines of Walter Savage Landor, descriptive of the Sea-shell, there is an allusion to the Sun’s palace and chariot. The water-nymph says:
“. . . I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and things that lustre have imbibed