VI. LA JEUNE TARENTINE.

This touching elegy, Becq de Fouquières observes, was suggested to Chénier by the following funereal epigram of Xenocritus of Rhodes in the Greek Anthology: 'Thy locks are still dripping, unfortunate maid, O Lysidice, poor shipwrecked creature, dead in the salt flood. As the waves leapt wild, thou, dismayed by the violence of the sea, fellst out of the ship; and now on a tombstone are read thy name and that of Cyme, the place of thy birth, but thy remains have been washed to some chill shore; a bitter grief to thy father Aristomachus, who, accompanying thee to the house of thy husband, brought him neither a bride nor a corpse.'

L. 2. Oiseaux chers à Thétis. 'Dilectae Thetidi alcyones,' Virgil, Georg. i. 399.

L. 3. Elle a vécu. A euphemism, adopted from the Latin, for elle est morte, used in elevated style. Thus Corneille: 'Non, non; avant ce coup Sabine aura vécu.'--Horace, II. vi.

L. 4. Camarine, a town in Sicily.

L. 5. l'hymen, the hymeneal song.

L. 8. Dans le cèdre: an accurate detail. Cf. Euripides, Alc. 160.

L. 11. invoquant les étoiles. A reminiscence, happily adapted, of Virgil, Aen. vi. 338: 'Palinurus... who, while he steering viewed the stars,... Fell headlong down.'--DRYDEN.

L. 13. étonnée. Étonner, whence E. astun, stun, astony, astonish, astound, from L. extonare class. L. attonare, to strike with a thunderbolt, originally 'to strike senseless, powerless.' It is here nearer this sense than weakened sense of 'to surprise'.

L. 21. dans ce monument. We here find that we are reading a 'funerary epigram' or epitaph.

L. 22. cap du Zéphyr. Cape Zephyrium at the southern end of Brutium.

L. 25. traînant un long deuil. Chénier thus renews, with advantage to the meaning, the current phrase: 'mener (=carry on) un deuil,' to make dole, mourn. This use of mener (cf. L. ducere in same sense) may be paralleled in English by the archaic 'lead great joy' (Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon, xx. 446), 'lead sorrow,' Partenay, 3785 (N.E.D., s. v. lead, 11 and 12 b).