on
"dead ere his prime." Cycnus, King of Liguria, had dearly loved the
gallant boy, and again and yet again he dived deep in the river and
brought forth the charred fragments of what had once been the
beautiful son of a god, and gave to them honourable burial. Yet he
could not rest satisfied that he had won all that remained of his
friend from the river's bed, and so he continued to haunt the stream,
ever diving, ever searching, until the gods grew weary of his restless
sorrow and changed him into a swan.

And still we see the swan sailing mournfully along, like a
white-sailed barque that is bearing the body of a king to its rest,
and ever and anon plunging deep into the water as though the search
for the boy who would fain have been a god were never to come to an
end.

To Phaeton the Italian Naiades reared a tomb, and inscribed on the
stone these words:

"Driver of Phoebus' chariot, Phaeton,
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."

Ovid.

ENDYMION

To the modern popular mind perhaps none of the goddesses of
Greece--not even Venus herself--has more appeal than has the huntress
goddess, Diana. Those who know but little of ancient statuary can
still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her
quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery
or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink,
slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on
this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is
quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome
young sportswoman whom he finds by the covert side; and Sir Walter's
Diana Vernon has helped the little-read public to realise that the
original Diana was a goddess worthy of being sponsor to one of the
finest heroines of fiction.

But not to the sportsman alone, but also to the youth or maid who
loves the moon--they know not why--to those whom the shadows of the
trees on a woodland path at night mean a grip of the heart, while
"pale Dian" scuds over the dark clouds that are soaring far beyond the
tree-tops and is peeping, chaste and pale, through the branches of the
firs and giant pines, there is something arresting, enthralling, in
the thought of the goddess Diana who now has for hunting-ground the
blue firmament of heaven where the pale P