Collected Works (Vol. III)

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.