As in a water’d garden’s blooming walk, When some rude hand has bruised its tender stalk, A fading lily droops its languid head, And bends to earth, its life and beauty fled; So Hyacinth, with head reclined, decays, And, sickening, now no more his charms displays.

“Oh, thou art gone, my boy,” Apollo cried, “Defrauded of thy youth in all its pride! Thou, once my joy, art all my sorrow now; And to my guilty hand my grief I owe. Yet from myself I might the fault remove, Unless to sport and play a fault should prove, Oh could I for thee, or but with thee, die! But cruel fates to me that power deny: Yet on my tongue thou shalt for ever dwell; Thy name my lyre shall sound, my verse shall tell; And to a flower transform’d, unheard of yet, Stamp’d on thy leaves, my cries thou shalt repeat: The time shall come, prophetic I foreknow, When, join’d to thee, a mighty chief 8 shall grow, And with my plaints his name thy leaf shall show.”