Читать книгу Bulfinch's Mythology - Bulfinch Thomas - Страница 24

“Driver of Phœbus’ chariot. Phaëton,

Struck by Jove’s thunder, rests beneath this stone.

He could not rule his father’s car of fire,

Yet was it much so nobly to aspire.”^[10]

His sisters, the Heliades, as they lamented his fate, were turned into poplar trees, on the banks of the river, and their tears, which continued to flow, became amber as they dropped into the stream.

Milman, in his poem of “Samor,” makes the following allusion to Phaëton’s story:

“As when the palsied universe aghast

Lay … mute and still,

When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth

Devious through Heaven’s affrighted signs his sire’s

Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled

From th’ empyrean headlong to the gulf

Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep

Even now the sister trees their amber tears

O’er Phaëton untimely dead.”

In the beautiful lines of Walter Savage Landor, descriptive of the Sea-shell, there is an allusion to the Sun’s palace and chariot. The water-nymph says:

“… I have sinuous shells of pearly hue

Within, and things that lustre have imbibed

In the sun’s palace porch, where when unyoked

His chariot wheel stands midway on the wave.

Shake one and it awakens; then apply

Its polished lip to your attentive ear,

And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.”

—Gebir, Book I.

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