When now Agenor had his daughter lost,
He sent his son to search on every coast,
And sternly bid him to his arms restore
The darling maid, or see his face no more,
But live in exile in a foreign clime;
Thus was the father pious to a crime.
The restless youth search’d all the world around;
But how can Jove in his amours be found?
When, tired at length with unsuccessful toil,
To shun his angry sire and native soil,
He goes a suppliant to the Delphic dame;
There asks the god what new-appointed home
Should end his wand’rings, and his toil relieve.
The Delphic oracles this answer give:
“Behold among the fields a lonely cow,
Unworn with yokes, unbroken to the plough:
Mark well the place where first she lays her down,
There measure out thy walls, and build thy town;
And from the guide Boeotia call the land,
In which the destined walls and town shall stand.”
No sooner had he left the dark abode,
Big with the promise of the Delphic god,
When in the fields the fatal cow he view’d,
Nor gall’d with yokes, nor worn with servitude;
Her gently at a distance he pursued,
And, as he walk’d aloof, in silence pray’d
To the great power whose counsels he obey’d.
Her way through flowery Panope she took,
And now, Cephisus, cross’d thy silver brook,
When to the heavens her spacious front she raised,
And bellow’d thrice, then backward turning gazed
On those behind, till on the destined place
She stoop’d, and couch’d amid the rising grass.
Cadmus salutes the soil, and gladly hails
The new-found mountains and the nameless vales,
And thanks the gods, and turns about his eye
To see his new dominions round him lie;
Then sends his servants to a neighb’ring grove
For living streams, a sacrifice to Jove.
O’er the wide plain there rose a shady wood
Of aged trees; in its dark bosom stood
A bushy thicket, pathless and unworn,
O’errun with brambles, and perplex’d with thorn:
Amid the brake a hollow den was found,
With rocks and shelving arches vaulted round.
Deep in the dreary den, conceal’d from day,
Sacred to Mars, a mighty dragon lay,
Bloated with poison to a monstrous size;
Fire broke in flashes when he glanced his eyes;
His towering crest was glorious to behold,
His shoulders and his sides were scaled with gold;
Three tongues he brandish’d when he charged his foes,
His teeth stood jaggy in three dreadful rows.
The Tyrians in the den for water sought,
And with their urns explored the hollow vault;
From side to side their empty urns rebound,
And rouse the sleeping serpent with the sound.
Straight he bestirs him, and is seen to rise,
And now with dreadful hissings fills the skies,
And darts his forky tongues, and rolls his glaring eyes.
The Tyrians drop their vessels in the fright,
All pale and trembling at the hideous sight.
Spire above spire uprear’d in air he stood,
And gazing round him overlook’d the wood,
Then floating on the ground in circles roll’d,
Then leap’d upon them in a mighty fold.
Of such a bulk and such a monstrous size
The serpent in the polar circle lies,
That stretches over half the northern skies.
In vain the Tyrians on their arms rely,
In vain attempt to fight, in vain to fly;
All their endeavours and their hopes are vain;
Some die entangled in the winding train;
Some are devour’d, or feel a loathsome death,
Swoln up with blasts of pestilential breath.
And now the scorching sun was mounted high,
In all its lustre, to the noonday sky,
When, anxious for his friends, and fill’d with cares,
To search the woods the impatient chief prepares.
A lion’s hide around his loins he wore,
The well-poised javelin to the field he bore,
Inured to blood, the far-destroying dart,
And, the best weapon, an undaunted heart.
Soon as the youth approach’d the fatal place,
He saw his servants breathless on the grass;
The scaly foe amid their corpse he view’d,
Basking at ease and feasting in their blood.
“Such friends,” he cries, “deserved a longer date;
But Cadmus will revenge, or share their fate.”
Then heaved a stone, and rising to the throw,
He sent it in a whirlwind at the foe;
A lower, assaulted by so rude a stroke,
With all its lofty battlements had shook;
But nothing here the unwieldy rock avails,
Rebounding harmless from the plaited scales,
That, firmly join’d, preserved him from a wound,
With native armour crusted all around.
With more success the dart unerring flew,
Which at his back the raging warrior threw:
Amid the plaited scales it took its course,
And in the spinal marrow spent its force.
The monster hiss’d aloud, and raged in vain,
And writhed his body to and fro with pain;
He bit the dart, and wrench’d the wood away;
The point still buried in the marrow lay;
And now his rage, increasing with his pain,
Reddens his eyes and beats in every vein;
Churn’d in his teeth the foamy venom flows,
While from his mouth a blast of vapours rose,
Such as the infernal Stygian waters cast;
The plants around him wither in the blast.
Now in a maze of rings he lies enroll’d;
Now all unravell’d and without a fold;
Now, like a torrent, with a mighty force
Bears down the forest in his boist’rous course.
Cadmus gave back, and on the lion’s spoil
Sustain’d the shock, then forced him to recoil:
The pointed javelin warded off his rage:
Mad with his pains, and furious to engage,
The serpent champs the steel, and bites the spear,
Till blood and venom all the point besmear.
But still the hurt he yet received was slight;
For, while the champion with redoubled might
Strikes home the javelin, his retiring foe
Shrinks from the wound, and disappoints the blow.
The dauntless hero still pursues his stroke,
And presses forward, till a knotty oak
Retards his foe, and stops him in the rear;
Full in his throat he plunged the fatal spear,
That in the extended neck a passage found,
And pierced the solid timber through the wound.
Fix’d to the reeling trunk, with many a stroke
Of his huge tail he lash’d the sturdy oak,
Till spent with toil, and lab’ring hard for breath,
He now lay twisting in the pangs of death.
Cadmus beheld him wallow in a flood
Of swimming poison intermix’d with blood,
When suddenly a speech was heard from high
(The speech was heard, nor was the speaker nigh),
“Why dost thou thus with secret pleasure see,
Insulting man! what thou thyself shalt be?”
Astonish’d at the voice, he stood amazed,
And all around, with inward horror, gazed,
When Pallas, swift descending from the skies,
Pallas, the guardian of
