rt a test of power presents:
Bright the small figures in her colors shine.
This angle Thracian Rhodope contains,
With Haemus; both their mortal bodies now,
To frozen mountains chang'd; whose lofty pride
Assum'd the titles of celestial powers.
Another corner held the wretched fate
Felt by Pygmaea's matron; Juno bade
Her vanquish'd rival soar aloft a crane;
And on her people wage continual war.
Antigone, she paints;--audacious she
With Jove's imperial consort durst contend;
By Jove's imperial queen she flits a bird:
Nor aids her Ilium ought; nor aids her sire,
Laoemedon;--upborne on snowy wings,
A stork she rises; loud with chattering bill
She noises. In the sole remaining part,
Was childless Cynaras, in close embrace,
Grasping the temple's steps, his daughters once;
And as he lies extended on the stone,
In marble seems to weep. Around the piece
She spreads the peaceful olive: all complete
Her work is ended with her favorite tree.

Arachne paints Europa, by a bull
Deceiv'd; the god a real bull appears;
And real seem the waves. She, backward turn'd,
Views the receding shore, and seems to shriek
Loud to her lost companions; seems to dread
The dashing waves, and timid shrinks her feet.
She draws Asteria, by the god o'er-power'd,
Cloth'd in an eagle. Leda, fair she lays
Beneath his wings, when he a swan appears.
She adds how Jove beneath a Satyr's shape
Conceal'd, the beauteous child of Nycteus fill'd,
With a twin-offspring. In Amphytrion's form
Alcmena, thou wert press'd. A golden shower
Danae deceiv'd. A flame AEgina caught.
A shepherd's shape Mnemosyne beguil'd.
And fair Deoeis trusts a speckled snake.
Thee, Neptune, too she painted, for the maid
AEolian, to a threatening bull transform'd.
Thou, as Enipeus, didst the Aloid twins
Beget. Beneath the semblance of a ram,
Theophane was cheated. Ceres mild,
Of grain inventress, with her yellow locks,
In shape a courser felt thy ardent love.
Medusa, mother of the flying steed,
Nymph of the snaky tresses, in a bird
Conceal'd, you forc'd. Melantho in a fish.
To these the damsel, all well-suiting forms
Dispens'd, and all well-suiting scenes attend.
And there Apollo in a herdsman's guise
Wanders. And now he soars a plumy hawk:
Now stalks a lordly lion. As a swain
Macarean Isse, felt his amorous guile,
Erigone to Bacchus' flame was dup'd
Beneath a well-