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