Page:The poetical works of Matthew Arnold, 1897.djvu/411

Rh Heracles gave us,

Son loved of Zeus his father—for he sinn'd,

And the strand of Eubœa,

And the promontory of Cenæum,

His painful, solemn

Punishment witness'd,

Beheld his expiation—for he died.

O villages of Œta

With hedges of the wild rose!

O pastures of the mountain,

Of short grass, beaded with dew,

Between the pine-woods and the cliffs!

O cliffs, left by the eagles,

On that morn, when the smoke-cloud

From the oak-built, fiercely-burning pyre,

Up the precipices of Trachis,

Drove them screaming from their eyries!

A willing, a willing sacrifice on that day

Ye witness'd, ye mountain lawns,

When the shirt-wrapt, poison-blister'd Hero

Ascended, with undaunted heart,

Living, his own funeral-pile,

And stood, shouting for a fiery torch;

And the kind, chance-arrived Wanderer,

The inheritor of the bow,

Coming swiftly through the sad Trachinians,

Put the torch to the pile.

That the flame tower'd on high to the Heaven;

Bearing with it, to Olympus,