Theseus, who, when he had vanquished the monster, and led the princess to give up all for him, forsook her as she lay asleep in Dia's sea-girt isle. The lament of Ariadne on discovering her desolation is a triumph of true poetic art in its accommodation of the measure to the matter in hand; the change from calm description to rapid movement and utterance, as, climbing mountain-top, or rushing forth to face the surges up-plashing over the beach to meet her, she utters outbursts of agony and passion intended to form a consummate contrast to the ideal happiness of them on whose coverlet this pathetic story was broidered. Two stanzas from Martin's beautiful and ballad-like version must represent the touching character of this lament, in which, by the way, are several turns of thought and expression which Virgil seems to have had in mind for the 4th Book of the 'Æneis:'—
How shall I fly to thee across this gulf of angry foam?
How meet my father's gaze, a thing so doubly steeped in guilt,
The leman of a lover, who a brother's blood had spilt?
And leaves me here to perish on this savage ocean steep.
No hope, no succour, no escape! None, none to hear my prayer!
All dark, and drear, and desolate; and death, death everywhere!"
—(C. Ixiv. vv. 177-187.)
The lines in which she declares that, had Ægeus objected to her for a daughter-in-law, she would have
