The look of a sorceress, full of bad passions, was never painted more strongly than in the meeting of those epithets, "wan and tyrannizing;" and the word "lady" makes the fierceness more shocking.

But Keats had not the heart to make the love part of the story end unhappily, much less to endure the brutification of the lovely limbs of Scylla. He revived her to be put into a Lover's Elysium. So, in telling the story of Alpheus and Arethusa, he will not let Arethusa reject Alpheus willingly. He makes her lament the necessity as one of the train of Diana; and leaves us to conclude that the lovers became happy. It would hardly be necessary to tell any reader (only it is as pleasant to repeat these stories, as it is to hear beautiful old airs) that Alpheus was a river-god of Greece, who fell in love with the wood-nymph Arethuse; and that the latter, praying for help to Diana, was converted into a stream, and pursued under land and sea by the other enamoured water, as far as the island of Sicily, where the streams became united. The strangeness of the adventure, and the beauty of the names, have made everybody in love with the story. All the world knows how "divine Alpheus," as Milton says-

or rather they all knew the fact; but the how, or manner of it, was a puzzle, till Keats related the adventure as it was witnessed by Endymion in a grotto under the sea. The lover of the Moon suddenly heard strange distant echoes, which seemed

The ghosts, the dying swells

Of noises far away-hist!-Hereupon

He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone

Came louder; and behold! there, as he lay,
On either side out-gush'd, with misty spray,
A copious spring; and both together dash'd
Swift, mad, fantastic round the rocks, and lash'd
Among the conchs and shells of the lofty grot,
Leaving a trickling dew."

(These are the two living streams, one in pursuit of the other.)

Down from the ceiling's height, pouring a noise
As of some breathless racers, whose hopes poise
Upon the last few steps, and with spent force
Along the ground they took a winding course.
Endymion follow'd, for it seem'd that one
Ever pursued, the other strove to shun."

After a while, he hears a whispering dialogue, in which the female voice shows plainly enough, that the speaker would stay if she might; but suddenly the severe face of Diana is before her, and in an instant

fell

Those two sad streams adown a fearful dell;"

and Endymion puts up a prayer for their escape.

When the writer of the present book was in Italy, he saw on a mantel-piece a card inscribed, Le Marquis de Retuse. This was the Frenchified denomination of a Sicilian nobleman, who, strangely combining Greek and Gothic in his title, was no less a personage than the Marquis of Arethusa! He was proprietor of the spot where the fountain exists under its old name, though, according to travellers, deplorably altered; for it has become, says one of them, the public "wash-tub!" is the Syracusan laundry. Divers, he informs us, are the jokes cracked on the "nymphs" that now attend it. Some

It

critics are of opinion, that such were the "only nymphs" that ever existed; and they are very merry over the fallen condition of the once exquisite Arethusa. Poor devils! taking pains to vulgarize their perceptions, and diminish the amount of grace and joy. As if Arethusa, like themselves, were at the mercy of a homely association; or all that had been written about her was no better than their own account with the laundress!

They flatter themselves. They leave her just where she was—everywhere, and immortal. It may not be very pleasant to look for a poetic fountain, and find a laundry; but the imagination is a poor one indeed, which is to be overwhelmed by it. The nymphs of minds like these could never have been very different from laundresses, if the truth were known; or, at the utmost, of little higher stock than such as laundresses and milliners are the making of.

There are two things, we confess, about the Sirens, that perplex us. In the first place, we never found anything particularly attractive in the songs attributed to them, not even by Homer; and secondly, we are too much in the secret of their deformity. We know that they were ghastly monsters, bird-harpies with women's heads, and surrounded with human bones; and the consequence is, we can never find them in the least degree enticing. It is to no purpose that they combine stringed with wind instruments, and a voice crowning all. One of them may call herself Fair-Goddess (Leucothea), and another Fine Voice (Ligeia), and the third, Maiden-Face (Parthenope). We know all about them, and are not to be taken in. It would require a dream as horrible as Coleridge's Pains of Sleep, to bring our antipathy into any communication with them to make us walk in our sleep towards their quarter:

"Desire with loathing strangely mix'd,
On wild and hateful objects fix'd;
Fantastic passions, maddening brawl,
And shame and terror over all."

When the modern poets turned the Sirens into mermaids, they vastly improved the breed. A woman, we grant, who is half a fish, is not a desideratum; but she is better than a great humanfaced bird hopping about; and besides, the conformation of the creatures being thus altered, we are not so sure they will do us harm, especially as the poets treat them with comparative respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The names abovementioned acquire a double elegance in the adjurations of the Spirit in Comus :—

"By Thetis' tinsel-slipper'd feet,

And the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia's golden comb,

Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks,

Sleeking her soft alluring locks."

These alluring locks come home to us. We have seen such at our elbows, and can hear the comb passing through them. Spenser increased the number of the Sirens to five, and expressly designated them as mermaids :

"And now they nigh approached to the stead
Whereas those mermaids dwelt. It was a still

And calmy bay, on th' one side sheltered
With the broad shadow of an hoary hill;

On th' other side an high rock towered still,
That 'twixt them both a pleasant port they made,
And did like an half theatre fulfil.

There those five sisters had continual trade,

And used to bathe themselves in that deceiptful shade."

FAERIE QUEENE, Book ii., Canto 12.

This line is so soft and gently drawn out, and the place altogether so sweet and natural, that when Sirens like these begin to sing, we really feel in danger. We do not wonder that the poet's hero desired his boatman to

row easily,

And let him hear some part of their rare melody."

In fact, they are even now detaining us too long; so we must push forward.

We have kept the most beautiful of the Sicilian mythic stories to conclude with: for such, doubtless, is the Rape of Proserpine. It is full of the most striking contrasts of grandeur and beauty. Both heaven and hell are in it-the freshest vernal airs, with the depths of Tartarus; and the hearts of a mother and daughter beat through all. It is a tale at once of the wildest preternaturalism and the most familiar domestic tenderness. The daughter of Ceres is gathering flowers, with other damsels of her own age, in the Vale of Enna, intent upon nothing but seeing who shall get the finest. Suddenly, in the midst of the violets and jonquils, there is an earthquake: a noise is heard like the coming of a thousand chariots; the earth bursts open; and a rapid, majestic figure appears, like a swarthy Jupiter, who, sweeping by Proserpine, whirls her away with him into his car, and prepares to rush down through another opening. Of all her attendants, the nymph Cyane alone has the courage to bid him stop, and ask him why he dares take away the daughter of Ceres. He makes no answer, but, knitting his brows like thunderbolts, smites the fountain over which she presided with his iron mace, and dashes down through it with his prey. It is the King of Hell himself, tired