“But he, by lust and indignation fired, Up to his highest tower with speed retired, And cries ‘In vain you from my arms withdrew, The way you go your lover will pursue.’ Then in a flying posture wildly placed, And daring from that height himself to cast, The wretch fell headlong, and the ground bestrew’d With broken bones, and stains of guilty blood.”
The daughters of Pierus challenge the Muses to a trial in music.
The muse yet spoke, when they began to hear A noise of wings that flutter’d in the air; And straight a voice, from some high-spreading bough, Seem’d to salute the company below. The goddess wonder’d, and inquired from whence That tongue was heard, that spoke so plainly sense. (It seem’d to her a human voice to be, But proved a bird’s; for in a shady tree Nine magpies perch’d, lament their alter’d state, And what they hear are skilful to repeat.)