’The flowers flush red for anguish....  This kiss will I treasure, even as thyself, Adonis, since, ah ill-fated! thou art fleeing me,... while wretched I yet live, being a goddess, and may not follow thee.  Persephone, take thou my lover, my lord, for thyself art stronger than I, and all lovely things drift down to thee....  For why ah overbold! didst thou follow the chase, and, being so fair, why wert thou thus over-hardy to fight with beasts?...  A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers....  Ah even in death he is beautiful, beautiful in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep....  All things have perished in his death, yea all the flowers are faded....  He reclines, the delicate Adonis, in his raiment of purple, and around him the Loves are weeping and groaning aloud, clipping their locks for Adonis.  And one upon his shafts, another on his bow, is treading, and one hath loosed the sandal of Adonis, and another hath broken his own feathered quiver, and one in a golden vessel bears water, and another laves the wound, and another, from behind him, with his wings is fanning Adonis....  Thou must again bewail him, again must weep for him another year....  He does not heed them [the Muses]; not that he is doth to hear, but that the Maiden of Hades doth not let him go.’

The next-ensuing passages come from the Elegy of Moschus for Bion:—­

’Ye flowers, now in sad clusters breathe yourselves away.  Now redden, ye roses, in your sorrow, and now wax red, ye wind-flowers; now, thou hyacinth, whisper the letters on thee graven, and add a deeper ai ai to thy petals:  he is dead, the beautiful singer....  Ye nightingales that lament among the thick leaves of the trees, tell ye to the Sicilian waters of Arethusa the tidings that Bion the herdsman is dead....  Thy sudden doom, O Bion, Apollo himself lamented, and the Satyrs mourned thee, and the Priapi in sable raiment, and the Panes sorrow for thy song, and the Fountain-fairies in the wood made moan, and their tears turned to rivers of waters.  And Echo in the rocks laments that thou art silent, and no more she mimics thy voice.  And in sorrow for thy fall the trees cast down their fruit, and all the flowers have faded....  Nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs,... nor so much, by the grey sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of dawn did the bird of Memnon bewail the son of the Morning, fluttering around his tomb, as they lamented for Bion dead....  Echo, among the reeds, doth still feed upon thy songs....  This, O most musical of rivers, is thy second sorrow,—­this, Meles, thy new woe.  Of old didst thou lose Homer:... now again another son thou weepest, and in a new sorrow art thou wasting away....  Nor so much did pleasant Lesbos mourn for Alcaeus, nor did the Teian town so greatly bewail her poet,... and not for Sappho but still for thee doth Mitylene wail her musical lament....