“Ye mountain valleys, pitifully groan! Rivers and Dorian springs for Bion weep! Ye plants drop tears! ye groves lamenting moan! Exhale your life, wan flowers; your blushes deep In grief, anemonies and roses, steep! In softest murmurs, Hyacinth! prolong The sad, sad woe thy lettered petals keep; Our minstrel sings no more his friends among Sicilian muses! now begin the doleful song.” _M. J. Chapman trans. in the Greek Pastoral Poets, 1836._ [Sidenote: _Story of Hyacinthus_] The allusion to Hyacinth is thus explained by Chapman:— “Hyacinthus, a Spartan youth, the son of Clio, was in great favour with Apollo. Zephyrus, being enraged that he preferred Apollo to him, blew the discus when flung by Apollo, on a day that Hyacinthus was playing at discus-throwing with that god, against the head of the youth, and so killed him. Apollo, being unable to save his life, changed him into the flower which was named after him, and on whose petals the Greeks fancied they could trace the notes of a grief, ἂι, ἂι.[5] A festival called the Hyacinthia was celebrated for three days in each year at Sparta, in honour of the god and his unhappy favorite.” _Note to Moschus_, Idyl iii. [Sidenote: _Told by Ovid_] The story of Apollo and Hyacinth is gracefully told by Ovid, in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses:— “Midway betwixt the past and coming night Stood Titan[6] when the pair, their limbs unrobed, And glist’ning with the olive’s unctuous juice, In friendly contest with the discus vied.” [The younger one is struck by the discus; and like a fading flower] “To its own weight unequal drooped the head Of Hyacinth; and o’er him wailed the god:— Liest thou so, Œbalia’s child, of youth Untimely robbed, and wounded by my fault— At once my grief and guilt?—This hand hath dealt Thy death! ’Tis I who send thee to the grave! And yet scarce guilty, unless guilt it were To sport, or guilt to love thee! Would this life Might thine redeem, or be with thine resigned! But thou—since Fate denies a god to die— Be present with me ever! Let thy name Dwell ever in my heart and on my lips, Theme of my lyre and burden of my song; And ever bear the echo of my wail Writ on thy new-born flower! The time shall come When, with thyself associate, to its name The mightiest of the Greeks shall link his own. Prophetic as Apollo mourned, the blood That with its dripping crimson dyed the turf Was blood no more: and sudden sprang to life A flower.” _Ovid’s Metamorphoses_ _trans. H. King_, _London_, 1871. [Sidenote: _Virgil Eclogue II._]