Demeter.

Demeter sad! the wells of sorrow lay     Eternal gushing in thy lonely path.      Methinks I see her now - an awful shape     Tall o'er a dragon team in frenzied search     From Argive plains unto the jeweled shores     Of the remotest Ind, where Usha's hand     Tinged her grief-cloven brow with kindly touch,     And Savitar wheeled genial thro' the skies     O'er palmy regions of the faneless Brahm.      In melancholy search I see her roam     O'er the steep peaks of Himalayas keen     With the unmellowed frosts of Boreal storms,     Then back again with that wild mother woe     Writ in the anguished fire of her eyes, -     Back where old Atlas groans 'neath weight of worlds,     And the Cimmerian twilight glooms the soul.     Deep was her sleep in Persia's haunted vales,     Where many a languid Philomela moaned     The bursting sorrow of a bursting soul.     I see her nigh Ionia's swelling seas     Cull from the sands a labyrinthine shell,     And hark the mystery of its eery voice     Float from the hollow windings of its curl,     Then cast it far into the weedy sea     To view the salt-spray flash, like one soft plume     Dropped from the wings of Eros, 'gainst the flame     Of Helios' car down-sloping toward his bath.     I see her beg a coral flute of red     From a tailed Triton; and on Ithakan rocks     High seated at the starry death of day,     When Selene rose from off her salty couch     To smile a glory on her face of sorrow,     Pipe forth sad airs that made the Sirens weep     In their green caves beneath the sodden sands,     And hoar Poseidon clear his wrinkled front     And still his surgy clamors to a sigh.      This do I see, and more; ah! yes, far more:     I see her, 'mid the lonely groves of Crete,     The wild hinds fright from the o'ervaulted green     Of thickest boscage, tangling their close covert,     With horror of her torches and her wail,     "Persephone! Persephone!" till the pines     Of rugged Dicte shuddered thro' their cones,     And Echo shrieked down in her deepest chasms     A wild reply unto her wild complaint;     As wild as when she voiced those maidens' woe,     Athenian tribute to stern Minos, king,     When coiling grim the Minotaur they saw     Far in his endless labyrinth of stone.