Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/42

Girl—spurn not Zeus! but fly to Lerne's mead,
That's green around thy father's flocks and stalls,
Until the passion of the heavenly eye
Be quenched in sight." Such dreams did, all night long,
Constrain me—me, unhappy!—till I dared
To tell my father how they trod the dark
With visionary steps; whereat he sent
His frequent heralds to the Pythian fane,
And also to Dodona, and inquired
How best, by act or speech, to please the gods,—
And these returning, brought back oracles
Of doubtful sense, indefinite response,
Dark to interpret. Then, at last, there came
To Inachus an answer that was clear,—
Thrown straight as any bolt, and spoken out.
This—"he should drive me from my home and land,
And bid me wander to the extreme verge
Of all the earth—or, if he willed it not,
Should have a thunder, with a fiery eye,
Leap straight from Zeus, to burn up all his race,
To the last root of it." By which Toxean word,
Subdued, he drove me forth, and shut me out,
He loth, me loth,—but Zeus's forceful bit
Compelled him to the deed!—And instantly
My body and soul were changed and distraught,
And, hornëd as ye see, and spurred along
By the fanged insect, with a maniac leap
I rushed on to Kenchrea's limpid stream,
And Lerne's fountain-well, And there, the earth-born,
The herdsman Argus, most immitigable
Of wrath, did find me out, and track me out