One day a youth espied her as he was hunting. She saw him and recognized
him as her own son, now grown a young man. She stopped and felt inclined
to embrace him. As she was about to approach, he, alarmed, raised his
hunting spear, and was on the point of transfixing her, when Jupiter,
beholding, arrested the crime, and snatching away both of them, placed
them in the heavens as the Great and Little Bear.
Juno was in a rage to see her rival so set in honor, and hastened to
ancient Tethys and Oceanus, the powers of ocean, and in answer to their
inquiries thus told the cause of her coming: “Do you ask why I, the
queen of the gods, have left the heavenly plains and sought your depths?
Learn that I am supplanted in heaven—my place is given to another. You
will hardly believe me; but look when night darkens the world, and you
shall see the two of whom I have so much reason to complain exalted to
the heavens, in that part where the circle is the smallest, in the
neighborhood of the pole. Why should any one hereafter tremble at the
thought of offending Juno, when such rewards are the consequence of my
displeasure? See what I have been able to effect! I forbade her to wear
the human form—she is placed among the stars! So do my punishments
result—such is the extent of my power! Better that she should have
resumed her former shape, as I permitted Io to do. Perhaps he means to
marry her, and put me away! But you, my foster-parents, if you feel for
me, and see with displeasure this unworthy treatment of me, show it, I
beseech you, by forbidding this guilty couple from coming into your
waters.” The powers of the ocean assented, and consequently the two
constellations of the Great and Little Bear move round and round in
heaven, but never sink, as the other stars do, beneath the ocean.
Milton alludes to the fact that the constellation of the Bear never
sets, when he says:
“Let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,” etc.
And Prometheus, in J. R. Lowell’s poem, says:
“One after one the stars have risen and set,
Sparkling upon the hoar frost of my chain;
The Bear that prowled all night about the fold
Of the North-star, hath shrunk into his den,
Scared by the blithesome footsteps of the Dawn.”
The last star in the tail of the Little Bear is the Pole-star, called
also the Cynosure. Milton says:
“Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landscape round it measures.
. . . . . . .
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies
The Cynosure of neighboring eyes.”
The reference here is both to the Pole-star as the guide of mariners,
and to the magnetic attraction of the North. He calls it also the “Star
of Arcady,” because Callisto’s boy was named Arcas, and they lived in
Arcadia. In “Comus,” the brother, benighted in the woods, says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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