Book 6
has caught with crooked talons the poor hare,
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and dropped it—ruthless,—in his lofty nest,
where there is no escape, his cruel eyes
gloat on the victim he anticipates.
And now, as Tereus reached his journey's end,
they landed from the travel-wearied ship,
safe on the shores of his own kingdom. Then
he hastened with the frightened Philomela
into most wild and silent solitudes
of an old forest; where, concealed among
deep thickets a forbidding old house stood:
there he immured the pale and trembling maid,
who, vainly in her fright, began to call
upon her absent sister,—and her tears
implored his pity. His obdurate mind
could not be softened by such piteous cries;
but even while her agonizing screams
implored her sister's and her father's aid,
and while she vainly called upon the Gods,
he overmastered her with brutal force.—
The poor child trembled as a frightened lamb,
which, just delivered from the frothing jaws
of a gaunt wolf, dreads every moving twig.
She trembled as a timid injured dove,
(her feathers dripping with her own life-blood)
that dreads the ravening talons of a hawk
from which some fortune has delivered her.
But presently, as consciousness returned,
she tore her streaming hair and beat her arms,
and, stretching forth her hands in frenzied grief,
cried out, “Oh, barbarous and brutal wretch!
Unnatural monster of abhorrent deeds!
Could not my anxious father's parting words,
nor his foreboding tears restrain your lust?
Have you no slight regard for your chaste wife,
my dearest sister, and are you without
all honor, so to spoil virginity
now making me invade my sister's claim,
you have befouled the sacred fount of life,—
you are a lawless bond of double sin!
