Here while young Proserpine, among the maids, Diverts herself in these delicious shades; While, like a child, with busy speed and care, She gathers lilies here, and violets there; While first to fill her little lap she strives, Hell’s grisly monarch at the shade arrives; Sees her thus sporting on the flowery green, And loves the blooming maid as soon as seen. His urgent flame impatient of delay, Swift as his thought he seized the beauteous prey, And bore her in his sooty car away. The frighted goddess to her mother cries; But all in vain, for now far off she flies; Far she behind her leaves her virgin train; To them too cries, and cries to them in vain; And while with passion she repeats her call, The violets from her lap and lilies fall: She misses them, poor heart! and makes new moan; Her lilies, ah! are lost, her violets gone.
O’er hills the ravisher and valleys speeds, By name encouraging his foamy steeds; He rattles o’er their necks the rusty reins, And ruffles with the stroke their shaggy manes. O’er lakes he whirls his flying wheels, and comes To the Palici, breathing sulph’rous fumes; And thence to where the Bacchiads of renown, Between unequal havens, built their town; Where Arethusa, round the imprison’d sea, Extends her crooked coast to Cyane; The nymph who gave the neighb’ring lake a name, Of all Sicilian nymphs the first in fame: She from the waves advanced her beauteous head; The goddess knew, and thus to Pluto said: “Farther thou shalt not with the virgin run; Ceres unwilling, canst thou be her son? The maid should be by sweet persuasion won: Force suits not with the softness of the fair; For, if great things with small I may compare, Me Anapis once loved; a milder course He took, and won me by his words, not force.”
But still does Cyane the rape bemoan, And with the goddess’ wrongs laments her own: For the stolen maid, and for her injured spring, Time to her trouble no relief can bring; In her sad heart a heavy load she bears, Till the dumb sorrow turns her all to tears: Her mingling waters with that fountain pass, Of which she late immortal goddess was; Her varied members to a fluid melt; A pliant softness in her bones is felt; Her wavy locks first drop away in dew, And liquid next her slender fingers grew; The body’s change soon seizes its extreme; Her legs dissolve, and feet flow off in stream; Her arms, her back, her shoulders, and her side, Her swelling breasts, in little currents glide; A silver liquor only now remains Within the channel of her purple veins; Nothing to fill love’s grasp: her husband chaste Bathes in that bosom he before embraced.
Overcome with fatigue, while in pursuit of her daughter, Ceres requests an old woman to supply her with a draught of water—A more generous liquor is hospitably afforded by the matron; and the goddess, while eagerly allaying her thirst, is derided by a boy, who is immediately transformer into an eft.
Thus while through all the earth and all the main, Her daughter mournful Ceres sought in vain, Aurora, when with dewy looks she rose, Nor burnish’d Vesper found her in repose. At Aetna’s flaming mouth two pitchy pines, To light her in her search, at length she tines; Restless, with these, through frosty night she goes, Nor fears the cutting winds, nor heeds the snows; And when the morning star the day renews, From east to west her absent child pursues.