ARETHUSA.

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 concealed behind

The urns of the silent snow,

And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder

The bars of the springs below:

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 pursuing

A dove to its ruin

Down the streams of the cloudy wind.

VOL. III.

4

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 night
Outspeeding the shark,

And the sword-fish dark,

Under the ocean foam,

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.

SONG OF PROSERPINE,

WHILE GATHERING FLOWERS ON THE PLAIN OF

ENNA.

SACRED Goddess, Mother Earth,
Thou from whose immortal bosom,
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and hud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew

Thou dost nourish these young
Till they grow, in scent and hue,

flowers

Fairest children of the hours,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

HYMN OF APOLLO.

THE sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,
Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the sky,

Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn, Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.

Then I arise, and climbing Heaven's blue dome, I walk over the mountains and the waves, Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;

My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the

caves

Are filled with my bright presence, and the air Leaves the green earth to my embraces bare.

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day; All men who do or even imagine ill

Fly me, and from the glory of my ray

Good minds and open actions take new might, Until diminished by the reign of night.

I feed the clouds, the rainbows, and the flowers, With their ethereal colours; the Moon's globe And the pure stars in their eternal bowers

Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;