Rhodopeïan fortresses wept, and Pangaean heights and Rhesus' martial land, Getae and Hebrus, and Actian Orithyia. He, soothing his love-sickness on his hollow shell, sang of thee, O sweet wife, of thee alone on the solitary shore, of thee at dayspring, of thee at the death of day. Even that gorge of Taenarus, the high gateway of Dis, and the grove that glooms in horror of darkness he entered, and drew nigh the ghostly people and their awful king, and the hearts that know not to melt at human supplications. But startled by his song from the deep sunken realm of Erebus thin shadows rose and phantoms of the lost to light, millionfold as birds shelter in the leaves when evenfall or wintry rain drives them from the hill; matrons and men and bodies of high-hearted heroes whose life was done, boys and unwedded girls and young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes: whom all round the black slime and ugly reeds of Cocytus and the sluggish wave of the unlovely pool enfetter, and Styx severs with the barrier of her ninefold flood. Nay, the very halls of death and Hell's recesses were amazed, and the Furies with livid serpents twined in their tresses; Cerberus held his triple jaws agape, and Ixion's whirling wheel hung motionless on the wind. And now his returning feet had outsped every peril, and his regained Eurydice was issuing to upper air, following at his back—for thus had Proserpine ordained—when a sudden madness seized the unwary lover, surely to be forgiven, if Death knew forgiveness. He stopped;
