METAMORPHOSES BOOK II
master, and then told him that he had seen Coronis lying beside the youth of Thessaly. When that charge was heard the laurel glided from the lover's head ; together countenance and colour changed, and the quill dropped from the hand of the god. And as his heart became hot with swelling anger he seized his accustomed arms, strung his bent bow from the horns, and transfixed with unerring shaft the bosom which had been so often pressed to his own. The smitten maid groaned in agony, and, as the arrow was drawn out, her white limbs were drenched with her red blood. “’Twas right, 0 Phoebus,” she said, “ that I should suffer thus from you, but first I should have borne my child. But now two of us shall die in one." And while she Spoke her life ebbed out with her streaming blood, and soon her body, its life all spent, lay cold in death.
The lover, alas! too late repents his cruel act; he hates himself because he listened to the tale and was so quick to break out in wrath. He hates the bird by which he has been compelled to know the offence that brought his grief; bow and hand he hates, and with that hand the hasty arrows too. He fondles the fallen girl, and too late tries to bring help and to conquer fate ; but his healing arts are exercised in vain. When his efforts were of no avail, and he saw the pyre made ready with the funeral fires which were to consume her limbs, then indeed—for the cheeks of the heavenly gods may not be wet with tears—from his deep heart he uttered piteous groans ; such groans as the young cow utters when before her eyes the hammer high poised from beside the right ear crashes with its resounding blow through the hollow temples of her suckling calf. The god pours fragrant incense on her unconscious breast, gives her
