At once from life and from the chariot driven, The ambitious boy fell thunderstruck from heaven; The horses started with a sudden bound, And flung the reins and chariot to the ground: The studded harness from their necks they broke, Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke, Here were the beam and axle torn away, And scatter’d o’er the earth the shining fragments lay. The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair, Shot from the chariot like a falling star, That in a summer’s evening from the top Of heaven drops down, or seems, at least, to drop, Till on the Po his blasted corpse was hurl’d, Far from his country, in the western world.