horses.

"Ah! falsehood! Daira is not given up to me. The brazen bell calls me to
the dead. It is another kind of Tartarus. There is no returning from it.
Horror!"

The abyss swallows her up.

_Bacchus_, laughing frantically:

"What does it matter! The wife of Archontes is my spouse! Even the law
goes down before drunkenness. For me the new song and the multiplied
forms!

"The fire which consumed my mother runs in my veins. Let it burn the
stronger, even though I perish!

"Male and female, good for both, I deliver myself to ye, Bacchantes! I
deliver myself to ye, Bacchantes! and the vine will twist around the
trunks of trees! Howl! dance! writhe! Unbind the tiger and the slave!
bite the flesh with ferocious teeth!"

And Pan, Silenus, the Satyrs, the Bacchantes, the Mimallones, and the
Maenades, with their serpents, their torches, and their black masks,
scatter flowers, then shake their dulcimers, strike their thyrsi, pelt
each other with shells, crunch grapes, strangle a he-goat, and rend
Bacchus.

_Apollo_, lashing his coursers, whose glistening hairs fly off--

"I have left behind me Delos the stony, so empty that everything there
now seems dead; and I am striving to reach the Delphian oracle before
its inspiring vapour should be completely lost. The mules browse on its
laurel. The pythoness, gone astray, is found there no longer.

"By a stronger concentration, I will have sublime poems, eternal
monuments; and all matter will be penetrated with the vibrations of my
cithara."

He fingers its chords. They break and snap against his face. He flings
down the instrument, and driving his four-horse chariot furiously:

"No! enough of forms! Farther still--to the very summit--to the world of
pure thought!"

But the horses, falling back, begin to prance so that the chariot is
smashed; and, entangled in the fragments of the pole and the knottings
of the horses, he falls head-foremost into the abyss.

The sky is darkened. Venus, blue as a violet from the cold, shivers.

"I covered with my girdle the entire horizon of Hellas. Its fields shone
with the roses of my cheeks; its shores were cut according to the form
of my lips; and its mountains, whiter than my doves, palpitated under
the hands of the sculptors. My spirit showed itself in the order of
festivities, the arrangements of head-dresses, the dialogues of
philosophers, and the constitution of republics. But I have loved men
too much. It is Love that has d