Conscious if voiceless, she. And he? The lyre Which, while its master hoped, had quenched its fire, Was ever confidant of his despair, The instrument commissioned to declare His wrongs. They tell who know, that in a cave Humid and bare, desolate as new grave, At the foot of a tall cliff, hung with ice, By Strymon’s gloomy waters, for full twice A hundred days and nights, singing he wept; Like a nightingale cruelly bereft Of all her young ones in the poplar grove, With nothing for her any more to love, Or live for, but to gaze upon her nest, And mourn, the night through, all she once possessed, Till overflows the wood where she complains, With the sweet melancholy of her strains. So longed he, and so played; changing at times To lands yet lonelier, and harsher climes; Arctic ice-fields crossed, forded snowy Don, Camped on Scythian heaths, where yews keep-on Eternal pall of frost;—always in quest Of postern into Hell, whence he might wrest Audience of its Lords, and with his tale Of unreal gifts, all pre-ordained to fail, Oblige them to repeat for very shame A boon Hell granted only to reclaim. No more than this? This his one hope and theme? This, sum of his powers? And this a dream! A dream? And yet the key—magic of Art!— Which could unlock at will a tiger’s heart, And, as notes rose and fell in cadence, made Triumphal arches of each sylvan glade; For true passion a hearing aye commands, And speaks a tongue all Nature understands. No more than that it had killed care to bless More than one life, and left a wilderness! And that it fell on Virgil to recall A legend—would that it lied!—how, when all The land’s women, Bacchus-fired, and distraught By hymns that Orpheus in glad days had taught, Had pressed him into the wild dance they led Nightly through torch-lit forests, and he fled In horror, as at treason to his love, They, infuriate more the more he strove, Followed, reckless of all but the mad chase, Down to the Hebrus from the hills of Thrace, And tore him limb from limb: but still the tongue, As the wild current rolled the head along, Called on “Eurydice”; and till the sea Received it, bank to bank returned “Eurydice”! Pardon, my Master, if I’ve dared re-think A thought, or, standing on the outer brink Of a deep pool, would with a pebble thrown Measure your depth of feeling by my own. But You the cause, the tempter;—who could read A tale like yours, and not pursue each deed From impulse to the act—complete a scene With such small details as there may have been? So cunningly you made romance to live— I trespassed on your stage; You must forgive! Praise of Italy P. VIRGILII MARONIS Georgicon, Bk. II. vv. 136-176