214
ORPHEUS
And helpless :—and the lonely mother-cry,
The Muse, her hope down-stricken. Magi-
cally
The full deep chorus stirs the sky ;
Hark ! one voice beyond all
Gives love’s own call,
Not hers, Eurydice’s,
But thine, thou sweet blood-breasted nightin-
gale
Waking thy choral wail
From Mitylene to remotest seas !
THE RIVER HEBRUS,
Was e’er a stream before
So sad a burden bore
Rolling a melancholy sorrow down from
shore to shore ?
CALLIOPE.
O this is bitterness beyond belief.
Grief beyond grief.
Boots it to weep? I holp him not
with force :
What should avail—remorse?
RIVER HEBRUS.
Hear upon high the melancholy
Antistrophe
Matching the strophe’s agony !
Tides on a terrible sea !
CALLIOPE.
Bear, bear the laureiled head
Of him I loved, him dead,
O Hebrus, ever downward on thy bosom
iron-red !
RIVER HEBRUS.
All Nature’s tunes are dull.
The beautiful,
The harmony of life is null.
CALLIOPE.
What unto us remains
But in these broken strains
To hymn with voices jarred the jarred world’s
shriek of woe?
O!0!
RIVER FELEBRUS.
This discord is an agony
Shuddering harsh in me;
My waters will empoison the fair fresh-water
sea !
CALLIOPE.
Nay ! all is ended now.
Cover the beaten brow !
Carry the brain of music into the wide
Aggean !
No priest pronounce thy pzean
Ever again, Apollo,
Thou false, thou fair, thou hollow !
Die to a groan within a shrine !
Despair thy force divine!
Thou didst achieve this ruin; let the
seas
Roar o’er thy lost name of Musagetes !
THE LESBIAN SHORE.
Welcome, O holy head !
Welcome, O force not dead !
Reverberating joy of music subtly
shed !
Welcome, O glorious, O laurelled one!
Own offspring of the Sun,
The ancient harmony was hardly yet
| begun.
By thee and bythy life
Aroze the Lesbian maiden.
Thou art perished as thy wife ;
My shores with magic loves and songs of life
are laden.
CALLIOPE.
Weep, weep no more!
O loyal Lesbian shore,
I hear a murmur sound more sweet than
murmur ever bore.
Not ocean’s siren spell
Soft-sounded in a spiral shell
Were quite so exquisite, were all so admir-
able !
LESBIAN SHORE.
Nay! but the agony of the time
Rings in the royal rime!
She hath touched the intimate, and chanced
on the sublime.