blood. Dido strives to raise her heavy eyes, and sinks down again; the deep stab gurgles in her breast. Thrice, with an effort, she lifted and reared herself up on her elbow; thrice she fell back on the couch, and with helpless wandering eyes aloft in the sky, sought for the light and groaned when she found it. Then Juno almighty, in compassion for her lengthened agony and her trouble in dying, sent down Iris from Olympus to part the struggling soul and its prison of flesh. For, as she was dying, not in the course of fate, nor for any crime of hers, but in mere misery, before her time, the victim of sudden frenzy, not yet had Proserpine carried off a lock of her yellow hair, and thus doomed her head to Styx and the place of death. So then Iris glides down the sky with saffron wings dew-besprent, trailing a thousand various colors in the face of the sun, and alights above her head. "This I am bidden to bear away as an offering to Pluto, and hereby set you free from the body." So saying, she stretches her hand and cuts the lock: at once all heat parts from the frame, and the life has passed into air.

VIRGIL'S DIDO.

BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

WITHOUT the sublime, we have said before, there can be no poet of the first order: but the pathetic may exist in the secondary; for tears are more easily drawn forth than souls are raised. So easily are they on some occasions, that the poetical power needs scarcely be brought into action; while on the others the pathetic is the very summit of sublimity. We have an example of it in the Ariadne of Catullus; we have another in the Priam of Homer. All the heroes and gods, debating and fighting, vanish before the father of Hector in the tent of Achilles, and before the storm of conflicting passions his sorrows and prayers excite. But neither in the spirited and energetic Catullus, nor in the masculine and scornful and stern Lucretius, no, nor in Homer, is there anything so impassioned, and therefore so sublime, as the last hour of Dido in the Æneid. Admirably as two Greek poets have represented the tenderness, the anguish, the terrific wrath and vengeance of Medea, all the works they ever wrote contain not the poetry

which Virgil has condensed into about a hundred verses, omitting as we must those which drop like icicles from the rigid lips of Æneas, and also the similes, which, here as everywhere, sadly interfere with passion.

PISIDICÊ.1

BY ANDREW LANG.

THE daughter of the Lesbian king,
Within her bower she watched the war:
Far off she heard the arrows ring,
The smitten harness ring afar;

And fighting on the foremost car,
Stood one who smote where all must flee:
Fairer than the immortals are

He seemed to fair Pisidicê!

Save one, that to Achilles' feet
Clung, but in sudden wrath cried he,
"For her no doom but death is meet,"
And there men stoned Pisidicê.

In havens of that haunted coast,

Amid the myrtles of the shore,
The moon sees many a maiden ghost,
Love's outcast now and evermore.
The silence hears the shades deplore
Their hour of dear-bought love; but thee
The waves lull, 'neath thine olives hoar,
To dreamless rest, Pisidicê!

THE LABORS OF HERCULES.

DECEIVED by the evil advice of Ate, the mischief-maker of the gods, Jupiter said to Juno his queen, "This day a child shall be born of the race of Perseus, who shall be the mightiest of all on earth." He meant his son Hercules; but Juno had a crafty trick in her mind, to lay a heavy curse on that son, whom naturally she hated for his being such. She asked Jupiter if what he had just said should surely be so, and he gave the nod which meant the vow that could not be recalled; then she went to the Fates and induced them to have Eurystheus born first, so that he should be the one mortal more powerful than Hercules, though a weak, jealous, and spiteful man.

So the lot was fixed that all his life long Hercules should toil at the will of a mean and envious master. He was matchless in strength, courage, and beauty; but he was to have neither profit nor comfort from them till he should pass from the land of mortals. But Jupiter was enraged at the ruin of his plans for the child by Juno's plot; he cast forth Ate from the halls of Olympus and forbade her to dwell again among the gods, and ordained that Hercules should dwell with the gods in Olympus as soon as his days of toil on earth were ended.

So Hercules grew up in the house of Amphitryon (the husband of Alcmena, the mother of the baby demigod), full of beauty and wonderful might. One day, as he lay sleeping, two huge serpents came into the chamber, twisted their coils round