From sacrilege will free the god's command: This earth our mighty mother is, the stones In her capacious body are her bones; These we must cast behind. With hope, and fear, The woman did the new solution hear: The man diffides in his own augury, And doubts the gods; yet both resolve to try. Descending from the mount, they first unbind Their vests, and, veiled, they cast the stones behind: The stones (a miracle to mortal view, But long tradition makes it pass for true,) Did first the rigour of their kind expel, And suppled into softness as they fell; Then swelled, and, swelling, by degrees grew warm, And took the rudiments of human form; Imperfect shapes, in marble such are seen, When the rude chisel does the man begin, While yet the roughness of the stone remains, Without the rising muscles, and the veins. The sappy parts, and next resembling juice, Were turned to moisture, for the body's use; Supplying humours, blood, and nourishment: The rest, too solid to receive a bent, Converts to bones; and what was once a vein, Its former name and nature did retain. By help of power divine, in little space, } What the man threw, assumed a manly face; } And what the wife, renewed the female race. } Hence we derive our nature, born to bear Laborious life, and hardened into care. The rest of animals, from teeming earth Produced, in various forms received their birth. The native moisture, in its close retreat, Digested by the sun's etherial heat, As in a kindly womb, began to breed; Then swelled, and quickened by the vital seed: And some in less, and some in longer space, Were ripened into form, and took a several face. Thus when the Nile from Pharian fields is fled, And seeks with ebbing tides his ancient bed, The fat manure with heavenly fire is warmed, And crusted creatures, as in wombs, are formed: These, when they turn the glebe, the peasants find: Some rude, and yet unfinished in their kind; Short of their limbs, a lame imperfect birth; One half alive, and one of lifeless earth. For, heat and moisture, when in bodies joined, The temper that results from either kind, Conception makes; and fighting, till they mix, Their mingled atoms in each other fix. Thus nature's hand the genial bed prepares, With friendly discord, and with fruitful wars. From hence the surface of the ground, with mud And slime besmeared, (the fæces of the flood,) Received the rays of heaven; and sucking in The seeds of heat, new creatures did begin. Some were of several sorts produced before; But of new monsters earth created more. Unwillingly, but yet she brought to light } Thee, Python, too, the wondering world to fright, }