Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/134

 he grew afraid, and in order to convince himself that his beloved wife was really behind him, he turned suddenly around—only to see Eurydice, with her arms outstretched, floating slowly backwards into the drear, dead land below. The grief of Orpheus at this second loss was even more intense than before, and half-crazed with sorrow and remorse, the poor lad stumbled to the banks of the river Strymon, where he mourned for seven days with neither food nor drink. At last he wandered up into the mountains where he fell into the hands of wild, bacchanalian revelers and came to a violent end. At the intercession of Apollo and the Muses, the harp of Orpheus was placed among the stars while the youth himself was tenderly cared for and buried beneath the shadow of Mount Olympus.

Some mythologists, however, claim that Orpheus was changed into a swan and placed in the heavens as the constellation of Cygnus so that he might be near Lyra, the constellation of the Harp, although the Latin poet Ovid claims that "Cygnus" took its name from "Cycnus," a friend of Apollo's son Phæthon. It might seem strange, on the face of it, that a celebrated singer like Orpheus should be changed into a bird as lacking in song as the swan, but it should be remembered that the ancients believed