"Midas the king, as in the book appears,
By Phœbus was endowed with ass's ears,
Which under his long locks he well concealed;
As monarch's vices must not be revealed:
For fear the people have them in the wind.
Who long ago were neither dumb nor blind:
Nor apt to think from heaven their title springs,
Since Jove and Mars left off begetting kings.
This Midas knew, and durst communicate,
To none but to his wife his ears of state:
One must be trusted, and he thought her fit,
As passing prudent, and a parlous wit.
To this sagacious confessor he went,
And told her what a gift the Gods had sent:
But told it under matrimonial seal,
With strict injunction never to reveal.
The secret heard, she plighted him her troth,
(And secret sure is every woman's oath,)
The royal malady should rest unknown,
Both for her husband's honour and her own.
But ne'ertheless she pined with discontent,
The counsel rumbled till it found a vent.
The thing she knew she was obliged to hide:
By interest and by oath the wife was tied:
But if she told it not the woman died.
Loth to betray her husband and a prince,
But she must burst or blab, and no pretence
Of honour tied her tongue in self defence.
The marshy ground commodiously was near,
Thither she ran, and held her breath for fear
Lest, if a word she spoke of any thing,
That word might be the secret of the king.
Thus full of council to the fen she went,
Full all the way, and longing for a vent.
Arrived, by pure necessity compelled,
On her majestic marrow-bones she kneeled,
Then to the water's brink she laid her head,
And, as a bittern sounds within a reed,
'To thee alone, oh! lake,' she said, 'I tell,
And as thy queen, command thee to conceal,
Beneath his locks, the king my husband wears
A goodly, royal pair of ass's ears.
Now I have eased my bosom of the pain,
Till the next longing fit returns again!'"
Ovid.
The story of Phaeton, (son of Apollo under the name of Phœbus) is as follows: Venus becoming enamoured of Phaeton, entrusted him with the care of one of her temples. This distinguished favour of the Goddess rendered him vain and aspiring; and when told, to check his pride, that he was not the son of Phœbus, Phaeton resolved to know his true origin; and at the instigation of his mother, he visited the palace of the sun, to beg that Phœbus, if he really were his father, would give him proofs of his paternal tenderness, and convince the world of his legitimacy. Phœbus swore by the Styx that he would grant him whatever he required; and Phaeton demanded of him to drive his chariot (that of the sun) for one day. In vain Phœbus represented the impropriety of his request, and the dangers to which it would expose him; the oath must be complied with. When Phaeton received the reins from his father, he immediately betrayed his ignorance and incapacity. The flying horses took advantage of his confusion, and departed from their accustomed track. Phaeton repented too late of his rashness, for heaven and earth seemed threatened with an universal conflagration, when Jupiter struck the rider with a thunderbolt, and hurled him headlong into the river Po. His body, consumed by fire, was found by the nymphs of the place, and honoured with a decent burial.
The Heliades, his sisters wept for four months, without ceasing, until the Gods changed them into poplars, and their tears into grains of amber; while the young king of the Ligurians, a chosen friend of Phaeton, was turned into a swan at the very moment he was yielding to his deep regrets. Aurora is also the daughter of Apollo. She granted the gift of immortality to Tithonus, her husband, son of the king of Troy; but soon perceiving that the gift was valueless, unless the power of remaining ever young was joined with it, she changed him into a grasshopper. From their union sprang Memnon, who was killed by Achilles at the siege of Troy. The tears of his mother were the origin of the early dew, and the Egyptians formed, in honour of him, the celebrated statue which possessed the wonderful property of uttering a melodious sound every morning at sunrise, as if in welcome of the divine luminary, like that which is heard at the breaking of the string of a harp when it is wound up. This was effected by the rays of the sun when they fell on it. At its setting, the form appeared to mourn the departure of the God, and uttered sounds most musical and melancholy; this celebrated statue was dismantled by the order of Cambyses, when he conquered Egypt, and its ruins still astonish modern travellers by their grandeur and beauty.
"Unto the sacred sun in Memnon's fane,
Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain;
Touched by his orient beam, responsive rings
The living lyre, and vibrates all its strings;
Accordant aisles the tender tones prolong,
And holy echoes swell the adoring song."
Darwin.
Apollo having slain with his arrows, Python, a monstrous serpent which desolated the beautiful country around Parnassus, his victory was celebrated in all Greece by the young Pythians; where crowns, formed at first of the branches of oak, but afterwards of laurel, were distributed to the conquerors, and where they contended for the prize of dancing, music and poetry.
It is from his encounter with this serpent, that in the statues which remain of him, our eyes are familiar with the bow placed in his grasp.
————————"The lord of the unerring bow,
The god of life, and poesy, and light,
The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow,
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow, bright
With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye
And nostril, beautiful disdain, and might,
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
"But in his delicate form, a dream of love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision, are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever blest