PASSING BY HELICON.
My steps are turned away,
Yet my eyes linger still,
On their beloved hill,
In one long, last survey:
Gazing through tears that multiply the view,
Their passionate adieu.
O joy-empurpled height,
Down whose enchanted sides
The rosy mist now glides,
How can I lose thy sight?
How can my eyes turn where my feet must go,
Trailing their way in woe?
Gone is my strength of heart;
The roses that I brought
From thy dear bowers, and thought
To keep, since we must part—
Thy thornless roses, sweeter until now,
Than round Hymettus' brow.
The golden-vested bees
Find sweetest sweetness in—
Such odors dwelt within
The moist red hearts of these—
Alas, no longer give out blissful breath,
But odors rank with death.
Their dewiness is dank,
It chills my pallid arms,
Once blushing 'neath their charms,
And their green stems hang lank,
Stricken with leprosy, and fair no more,
But withered to the core.
Vain thought, to bear along
Into this torrid track,
Whence no one turneth back
With his first wanderer's song
Yet on his lips, thy odors and thy dews,
To deck these dwarfed yews.
No more within thy vales,
Beside thy plashing wells,
Where sweet Euterpe dwells
With songs of nightingales,
And sounds of flutes that make pale Silence glow,
Shall I their rapture know.
Farewell, ye stately palms
Clashing your cymbal tones
In thro' the mystic moans
Of pines at solemn psalms;
Ye myrtles, singing Love's inspired song,
We part, and part for long.
Farewell, majestic peaks
Whereon my listering soul
Hath trembled to the roll
Of thunders that Jove wreaks—
And calm Minerva's oracles hath heard
All more than now unstirred.
Adieu, ye beds of bloom;
No more shall zephyr bring
To me, upon its wing,
Your loveliest perfume;
No more upon your pure, immortal dyes,
Shall rest my happy eyes.
I pass by; at thy foot
O mount of my delight,
Ere yet from out thy sight,
I drop my voiceless lute:
Relentless Nemesis my doom hath sent—
This cruel banishment.