Near Enna’s walls a spacious lake is spread,
Famed for the sweetly-singing swans it bred;
Pergusa is its name: and never more
Were heard, or sweeter on Cayster’s shore.
Woods crown the lake; and Phoebus ne’er invades
The tufted fences, or offends the shades:
Fresh fragrant breezes fan the verdant bowers,
And the moist ground smiles with enamell’d flowers:
The cheerful birds their airy carols sing,
And the whole year is one eternal spring.
Here while young Proserpine, among the maids,
Diverts herself in these delicious shades;
While, like a child, with busy speed and care,
She gathers lilies here, and violets there;
While first to fill her little lap she strives,
Hell’s grisly monarch at the shade arrives;
Sees her thus sporting on the flowery green,
And loves the blooming maid as soon as seen.
His urgent flame impatient of delay,
Swift as his thought he seized the beauteous prey,
And bore her in his sooty car away.
The frighted goddess to her mother cries;
But all in vain, for now far off she flies;
Far she behind her leaves her virgin train;
To them too cries, and cries to them in vain;
And while with passion she repeats her call,
The violets from her lap and lilies fall:
She misses them, poor heart! and makes new moan;
Her lilies, ah! are lost, her violets gone.
O’er hills the ravisher and valleys speeds,
By name encouraging his foamy steeds;
He rattles o’er their necks the rusty reins,
And ruffles with the stroke their shaggy manes.
O’er lakes he whirls his flying wheels, and comes
To the Palici, breathing sulph’rous fumes;
And thence to where the Bacchiads of renown,
Between unequal havens, built their town;
Where Arethusa, round the imprison’d sea,
Extends her crooked coast to Cyane;
The nymph who gave the neighb’ring lake a name,
Of all Sicilian nymphs the first in fame:
She from the waves advanced her beauteous head;
The goddess knew, and thus to Pluto said:
“Farther thou shalt not with the virgin run;
Ceres unwilling, canst thou be her son?
The maid should be by sweet persuasion won:
Force suits not with the softness of the fair;
For, if great things with small I may compare,
Me Anapis once loved; a milder course
He took, and won me by his words, not force.”
Then, stretching out her arms, she stopp’d his way:
But he, impatient of the shortest stay,
Throws to his dreadful steeds the slacken’d rein,
And strikes his iron sceptre through the main;
The depths profound through yielding waves he cleaves,
And to hell’s centre a free passage leaves;
Down sinks his chariot, and his realms of night
The god soon reaches with a rapid flight.