Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/125

ll. 460–515.] his own Eurydice was just on the edge of daylight; forgetful, alas! and impassioned he looked round on her. There all his toil was spilt and the treaty broken with that merciless monarch; and thrice a thunder pealed over the pools of Avernus. Who, woe's me! she cries, hath destroyed me, and thee with me, Orpheus? what frenzy is this? Lo, again the cruel fates call me backward, and sleep hides my swimming eyes. And now goodbye: I pass away wrapped in a great darkness, and helplessly stretching towards thee the hands that, alas! are not thine. She spoke and suddenly out of his eyes, like vapour melting in the thin air, fled into the distance, neither saw him more as he vainly grasped at the shadows and fain would say many a word; nor did the gatekeeper of Orcus suffer him again to cross that barring pool. What could he do? or whither turn now his wife was twice torn away? how with words or with weeping stir the realm of Death? and she even now floated cold in the Stygian bark. Seven whole months unbroken they say he wept beneath an aery rock by Strymon's solitary wave, and poured forth all his tale deep in icy caverns, soothing tigresses and moving oaks with song: even as the nightingale mourning under the poplar shade moans her lost brood whom the cruel ploughman has marked and torn unfledged from the nest: but she weeps nightlong, and seated on the bough renews her pitiable song and fills the region round with her mournful complaint. Never did love nor ever a