Orpheus had been espoused but one short hour, And went to gather roses for the bower, When a rejected wooer, mad with love, Sprang upon the light-footed nymph, and strove For an embrace; she, heeding nought, alas! Trod on a serpent sleeping in the grass; And when on the instant, answering her cries, Her Bridegroom knelt there, kissing her closed eyes, Half fainting with the sense of all her charms, Sudden he woke, a dead Bride in his arms! Not his alone the woe and misery; Nor he sole mourner for Eurydice; From Rhodope to Pangæa’s peaks, above The cave where Boreas hid his Attic love, Through the fierce realm of Rhesus, echo bore The wail to the wild Getes, to the shore Of Hebrus, while in forest, hill, and dale The tuneful Dryads told the tearful tale. But how conjure by the best ordered show Of grief an irremediable woe! Orpheus fled Pity, and neighbourly Care; All human fellowship but his despair. With but that and his lyre communion still He held, from dawn to sunset, then until The planets rose and sank, banishing sleep, Keeping sad vigils by the moaning deep, Thinking each shadow on the desert shore Was his lost Bride restored to life once more. And was it days, weeks, months, or years?—at last From the ghost-haunted waters coastward passed— Whether Goddess, or Woman—a pale shape, That beckoned to the far Laconian Cape Of Tænarus, where the dread cavern draws Each generation down its hungry jaws. At the first touch of his lyre opened wide The lofty gates of Hell; he paced inside The grove impenetrable by but him; A darkness that might be felt, stark, and grim, Where bide the awful ministers of Dis, With hearts that never beat at prayer but his. And still the notes rose bravely; and still he Came, calling on his lost Eurydice; On her, sole burden of his love-lorn cries— One theme informing countless melodies. At the sweet sorrowing, awhile a hush— Amazement—throughout Hades; then a rush— A quick rustling rather, as when a flight Of birds seeks where to sleep at fall of night, Or, cow’ring, courts, against an icy breeze, Multitudinous foliage of trees. Thus—for the jailers ceased from watch and ward, Witched themselves by the wailing, wandering bard— Flocked, from the unamiable swamp, which feeds Nothing on its black slime but grisly reeds— Where steams and groans Cocytus, and Styx holds Prisoners within its nine coils and folds— A legion of the newly dead, entombed In Limbo, till ripe to be tried and doomed; A fearful gathering, bodies stripped of life, Yet moving; some in pairs, husband and wife, Girls who had virgins died, and beardless youths, With parents’ kisses warm upon their mouths; And some though freed from flesh ignorant where Their dwelling fixed, sad phantoms, thin as air. Each waiting judgment; now forgetting all Griefs in a greater, in the musical