Jupiter And The Thunderbolts (Prose Fable)

Said Jupiter, one day,
As on a cloud he lay,
'Observing all our crimes,
Come, let us change the times,
By leasing out anew
A world whose wicked crew
Have wearied out our grace,
And cursed us to our face.
Hie hellward, Mercury;
A Fury bring to me,
The direst of the three.
Race nursed too tenderly,
This day your doom shall be!'
E'en while he spoke their fate,
His wrath began to moderate.

O kings, with whom His will
Hath lodged our good and ill,
Your wrath and storm between
One night should intervene!

The god of rapid wing,
And lip unfaltering,
To sunless regions sped,
And met the sisters dread.
To grim Tisiphone,
And pale Megaera, he
Preferr'd, as murderess,
Alecto, pitiless.
This choice so rouse...

[1]

How danger would the gods enrich,
If we the vows remember'd which
It drives us to! But, danger past,
Kind Providence is paid the last.
No earthly debt is treated so.
'Now, Jove,' the wretch exclaims, 'will wait;
He sends no sheriff to one's gate,
Like creditors below;'
But, let me ask the dolt,
What means the thunderbolt?

A passenger, endanger'd by the sea,
Had vow'd a hundred oxen good
To him who quell'd old Terra's brood.
He had not one: as well might he
Have vow'd a hundred elephants.
Arrived on shore, his good intents
Were dwindled to the smoke which rose
An offering merely for the nose,
From half a dozen beefless bones.
'Great Jove,' said he, 'behold my vow!
The fumes of beef thou breathest now
Are ...

[1]

For Monseigneur The Duke Du Maine.

To Jupiter was born a son,[2]
Who, conscious of his origin,
A godlike spirit had within.
To love, such age is little prone;
Yet this celestial boy
Made love his chief employ,
And was beloved wherever known.
In him both love and reason
Sprang up before their season.
With charming smiles and manners winning,
Had Flora deck'd his life's beginning,
As an Olympian became:
Whatever lights the tender flame, -
A heart to take and render bliss, -
Tears, sighs, in short the whole were his.
Jove's son, he should of course inherit
A higher and a nobler spirit
Than sons of other deities.
It seem'd as if by Memory's aid -
As if a previous life had made
Experiment and hid i...

Jupiter had a son, who, sensible of his lofty origin, showed always a god-like spirit. Childhood is not much concerned with loving; yet to the childhood of this young god, loving and wishing to be loved was the chief concern. In him, love and reason which grow with years, outraced Time, that light-winged bearer of the seasons which come, alas! only too quickly.

Flora,[14] with laughing looks and winning airs, was the first to touch the heart of the youthful Olympian. Everything that passion could inspire - delicate sentiments full of tenderness, tears, and sighs - all were there: he forgot nothing. As a son of Jupiter he would by right of birth be dowered with greater gifts than the sons of other gods; and it seemed as though all his behaviour were prompted by the reminiscence that he had indeed already been a lover ...

OD. iii. 3.


The just man's single-purposed mind
Not furious mobs that prompt to ill
May move, nor kings' frowns shake his will
Which is as rock; not warrior-winds

That keep the seas in wild unrest;
Nor bolt by Jove's own finger hurled:
The fragments of a shivered world
Would crash round him still self-possest.

Jove's wandering son reached, thus endowed,
The fiery bastions of the skies;
Thus Pollux; with them Caesar lies
Beside his nectar, radiant-browed.

For this rewarded, tiger-drawn
Rode Bacchus, reining necks before
Untamed; for this War's horses bore
Quirinus up from Acheron,

When in heav'n's conclave Juno said,
Thrice welcomed: "Troy is in the dust;
Troy, by a judge accursed, unjust,
And that strange...

While we to Jove select the holy victim
Whom apter shall we sing than Jove himself,
The god for ever great, for ever king,
Who slew the earthborn race, and measures right
To heaven's great 'habitants? Dictaean hear'st thou
More joyful, or Lycaean, long dispute
And various thought has traced. On Ida's mount,
Or Dictae, studious of his country's praise,
The Cretan boasts thy natal place; but oft
He meets reproof deserved; for he, presumptuous,
Has built a tomb for thee who never know'st
To die, but liv'st the same to-day and ever.
Arcadian therefore be thy birth: great Rhea,
Pregnant, to high Parrhasia's cliffs retired,
And wild Lycaeus, black with shading pines;
Holy retreat! sithence no female hither,
Conscious of social love and Nature's rites,
Must dare...