branches, and lavished kisses on the wood. The branches shrank from his lips. "Since thou canst not be my wife," said he, “ thou shalt assuredly be my tree. I will wear thee for my crown. I will decorate with thee my harp and my quiver. When the Roman conquerors conduct the triumphal pomp to the Capitol, thou shalt be woven into wreaths for their brows. And, as eternal youth is mine, thou also shalt be always green, and thy leaf know no decay." The laurel tree bowed its head in grateful acknowledgment.

The delicious humor of Lowell's extravaganza upon the story amply justifies the following citation:

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;

Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,
And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;

And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her,
He somehow or other had never forgiven her;

Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,

Something bitter to chew when he'd play the Byronic,

And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over
By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.
"My case is like Dido's," he sometimes remarked;

"When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked

In a laurel, as she thought—but (ah, how Fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it, —
You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress!
What romance would be left?-who can flatter or kiss trees?
And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,—
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood?
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough!

If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right,

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite."1

2

§ 86. Clytie. In the story of Clytie the conditions are reversed. She was a water-nymph and in love with Apollo, who made her no return. So she pined away, sitting all day long upon the cold ground, with her unbound tresses streaming over her shoulders. Nine days she sat and tasted neither food nor drink, her own tears and the chilly dew her only sustenance. She gazed on the sun when he rose; and as he passed through his daily course to his setting, she saw no other object, - her eyes fixed constantly on him. At last, they say, her limbs took root in the ground, and her face became a flower, turning on its stem to follow the journeying sun.

In the following lines, Thomas Moore uses the flower as an emblem of constancy:—

The heart that has truly loved never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close;

As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look that she turned when he rose.

6. MYTHS OF DIANA.

§ 87. In company with her radiant brother, we find Diana subduing Tityus and the Python and assisting in the punishment of Niobe. The speedy transformation

of Daphne has been attributed to this goddess, the champion of maidenhood. According to some, it was she, too, that changed Callisto into a bear, when for love of Jupiter that nymph deserted the huntress-band.

Numerous are the myths that celebrate the severity of the goddess of the unerring bow toward those who offended her. How she

1 From the Fable for Critics.

2 Ovid, Metam. 4:256–270.

served Agamemnon for slaying one of her hinds is told in the story of Troy; how she punished Eneus for omitting a sacrifice to her is narrated in the episode of the Calydonian hunt.2 Similar attributes of the goddess are exemplified in the myths of Arethusa, Actæon, and Orion. It is only when she is identified with Selene, the peaceful moonlight, that we perceive a softer side of character, such as that displayed in her relations with Endymion.

§ 88. The Flight of Arethusa.3-A woodland nymph of Elis was this Arethusa; she delighted not in her comeliness, but in the joys of the chase. One day, returning from the wood, heated with exercise, she descended to a stream silently flowing, so clear that you might count the pebbles on the bottom. She laid aside her garments; but while she sported in the water, she heard an indistinct murmur rising as out of the depths of the stream. She made haste to reach the nearest bank. A voice followed her, "Why flyest thou, Arethusa? Alpheus am I, the god of this stream." The nymph ran, the god pursued. Arethusa, at last exhausted, cried for help to Diana, who, hearing, wrapped her votary in a thick cloud. Perplexed, the river-god still sought the trembling maiden. But a cold sweat came over her. In less time than it takes to tell, she had become a fountain. Alpheüs attempted then to mingle his stream with hers. But the Cynthian queen cleft the ground; and Arethusa, still endeavoring to escape, plunged into the abyss, and passing through the bowels of the earth, came out in Sicily, still followed by the passionate river-god.

In the following version of the pursuit, Arethusa was already a river when Alpheüs espied her.

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 mountain 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.

Under the bowers

Where the Ocean Powers

Sit on their pearlèd 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 colored 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 past 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: