THE MARRIAGE OF ACHILLES.
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BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE BROTHERS,” “CROMWELL,” “RINGWOOD THE ROVER,” ETC.
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It was a day of Truce in the fair Troad!—the festival of the great Doric and Ionian God, sacred to either nation—it was a day of general peace, of general rejoicing! The ninth year of the war was far advanced toward its termination. Hector, the mighty prop of Troy, had fallen; yet did the Grecian host still occupy their guarded camp by the dark waters of the Hellespont; nor had the indomitable valor of the Goddess-born prevailed to level with the dust the towers of Troy divine. For fresh allies had buckled on their armor for the defence of Priam—Memnon, son of the morning, like his great rival half immortal, with his dark Coptic hosts, had rushed from the far banks of the giant Nile—ill-fated prince and hero!—rushed, but to swell the triumphs of the invincible Thessalian, to water with his life-blood the flowery pastures of the land he vainly hoped to save. Penthesilea, virgin queen of the man-defying virgins—fairest of earth’s fair daughters—had left her boundless plains beside the cold Thermodon—had called her quivered heroines from warring with the mountain pard, and chasing the huge urus of the plain, to launch the unerring shaft and ply the two-edged axe against the sevenfold shield of Salamis, against the Pelian spear. Alas! not her did her unrivalled horsemanship, in which she set her trust—in which she might have coped successfully with the world-famed Bellerophontes—not her did her skill with the feathered reed avail, against the speed of him who left the winds behind in his career, whose might was more than human. She too lay prone before him—the dazzling charms of her voluptuous bosom revealed to the broad sunshine, as he tore off the jewelled cincture—tore off the scaly breastplate—the hyacinthine tresses, soiled in the gory dust—tresses wherewith she might have veiled her form even to the ankles, so copious was their flow! Oh she was beautiful in death—and avenged by her beauty!—For the fierce conqueror wept and bore her to his own pavilion, and hung enamored for long days over those fatal charms; and pressed the cold form to his fiery heart, and kissed with fervid lips the cold and senseless eyelids, the mouth that answered not to his unnatural rapture. The fate of Troy, as on the bravest of her sons, had fallen on the best of her allies—the fiat of the destinies had long ago gone forth—the fiat which the dwellers of Olympus, the revellers on Nectar and Ambrosia,—which Jove himself, although he were reluctant, must obey! The ancestral curse was on the walls of Ilium, and all who should defend them. They fell there one by one, valiant, sometimes victorious—Sarpedon, Cyenus fell—Memnon, Penthesilea! Yet falling they deferred the ruin which they might not avert—so Troy still stood, although her mightiest were down—and when the brazen cymbals of Cybele summoned her sons to battle, they still rushed forth in throngs, determined to the last and unsubdued; and with Deiphobus to lead—worthy successor of their mightier hero—they battled it still bravely on the plain, between the city and the sea.
But now it was all harmony and peace!—the spears were pitched into the yellow sand beside the Grecian galleys, or hung, each on its owner’s wall, within the gates of Ilium. The plain, the whole fair plain, was crowded now—more densely crowded than it had ever showed, when in the deadliest fight the kindred nations mingled—for now not warriors only, but the whole population of the camp, the country and the town, traversed its grassy surface in gay and gorgeous companies. Gray headed men were there, counsellors and contemporaries of old Priam, eager to look upon the field whereon such exploits had been done—matrons come out to weep above the green graves of their sons and spouses, graves which till then they ne’er had visited, nor decked with votive garlands, nor watered with a tear—maidens in all the frolic mirth of their blythe careless youth, panting to gather flowrets from the green banks of Simois and Xanthus, Phrygian streams, to chase the gaudy butterfly, to listen to the carol of the bird—to drink in with enchanted ears the sylvan harmonies from which they had so long been shut within the crowded walls of the beleaguered city.
It was a wondrous spectacle—Yea! beautiful exceedingly! Men in those days were indeed images of the immortal—women, types of ideal loveliness!—many a form was there of youthful warriors, such as were models unto him who wrought from the inanimate rock of Paros, that breathing, deathless god, the slayer of the Python—many a girlish shape such as we worship in the poet’s dream, Psyche, or Hebe, or Europa—many a full blown figure, ripe in the perfect luxury of womanhood, such as enchants the eyes, intoxicates the hearts, enthrals the souls, of all who look upon the Medicean Venus. Then the rich oriental garbs—the half transparent robes of gauze-like Byssus, revealing all the symmetry, and half the delicate hues, of the rich charms they seemed to veil—the jewelled zones and mitres, the golden network, scarce restraining the downward sweep of the redundant ringlets!—the priests in stoles of purest snow, sandalled and crowned with gold!—the sacrificers in their garbs succinct—the spotless, flower-crowned victims!—the music—and the odors!—and the song! The wild exulting bursts of the mad Bacchic Dithyramb!—the statelier and more solemn chant, warbled by hundred tongues of boys and stainless virgins, in honor of the Pure, Immaculate God—the silver-bowed—the light-producer—the golden-haired, and yellow-sworded—the healer—the averter—the avenger!—son of Latona and of Jove—Delian and Thymbrœan King!—the blast of the shrill trumpets, blent with the deep, deep roll of the Corybantian drum, loud as the deafening roar of subterranean thunder, and the sharp clashing of the Cretan cymbal, and the shrill rattle of the systrum! the chariots and the coursers of the god!—chariots of polished brass, reflecting every beam of the broad Asiatic sun till they seemed cars of living flame—coursers of symmetry unmatched, snow-white, with full spirit-flashing eyes, and nostrils wide distended, trampling the flowery sod as if they were proud of their golden trappings, and conscious of the God their owner!
Far in a haunted grove, beneath the towering heights of Ida, where never yet, during the whole nine years of deadly strife, had the red hand of war intruded—far in a haunted grove, whither no beam of the broad day-god pierces even from his meridian height—so densely is it set with the eternal verdure of the laurel, high over-canopied by green immortal palm—so closely do the amorous vines embrace both palm and laurel weaving a vault of solid everlasting greenery—where the perpetual chant of the nightingale is mingled only with the faint sigh of the breeze that plays forever among the emerald alleys, and the sweet tinkling voice of the Thymbrœan rill, cold from its icy cradle on the cloud-curtained hill of Jove—unvisited by feet of profane visitor, stands the secluded shrine of the Pure God—a circular vault of whitest Parian marble, reared on twelve Doric shafts, their pedestals and bases of bright virgin gold. Beneath the centre of the dome is placed a circular altar of the same chaste materials, wrought with the most superb reliefs, descriptive of the birth, the exploits, and the histories of the great Deity—and in a niche immediately behind it—the Deity himself—the naked limbs—all grace and youthful beauty—the swell of the elastic muscles, the life-like, almost breathing protrusion of the expanded chest—the swan-like curvature of the proud neck, the scornful curl of the almost girlish lips, the wide indignant nostril, the corded veins of the broad forehead from which the clustered locks stream back, waved as it were by some spiritual breath prophetic, the lightning glance of the triumphant eye shot from beneath the brows half bended in a frown, proclaimed the Python killer—the Boy-god now in the flush of his first triumph!— The fierceness kindled by the perilous strife was not yet faded from the eye—yet he smiles, scornfully smiles, at the very ease with which he has prevailed over his dragon foe!
A dim religious twilight reigned through that solemn shrine; it would have been a solemn darkness, but for the pencils of soft emerald-colored light, which streamed down here and there full of bright wandering motes, among the tangled foliage—and for the pale transparent glow soaring up from the marble altar, whereon fed by the richest spices and the most generous wine, the sacred flame played to and fro, lambent and imitative of the lights that stud the empyrean.