Alas! Ye awful waves of hell, ye gloomy palaces where Megaera and her sisters hold their court, far ever foes to the sun's light, amongst your Ixions and your Tantaluses, in the midst of so many incessant tortures, in these hideous recesses, what pain, what toil so great as those to which Venus condemns my love? Yet my troubles satisfy not her wrath; and since I am subject to her laws, since I see myself a prey to her resentment, in these cruel moments I must have had more than one soul, more than one life, to fulfil her commands. Yet all this I could bear with joy if, in the midst of her hatred, my eyes could behold, were it for one moment only, my darling, my beloved lover! His name I dare not utter; my lips, whose guilt it was to exact too much, are now unworthy of him; and in this deadly anguish, the keenest pain my ever-returning death subjects me to is that I may not see him. If his anger lasted still, no anguish could equal mine; but if he felt any pity for a soul that worships him, however great the sufferings to which I am condemned, I should feel them not. Yea, thou mighty destiny, if he would but stay his wrath, all my sorrows would be at an end. Ah! a mere look from the son suffices to make me insensible to the mother's fury. I will doubt it no longer; he shares my grief, he sees what I endure, and weeps with me; my sufferings are his too; it is a self-imposed law of love; in spite of Venus, in spite of my crime, he it is who sustains and revives me in the midst of the dangers I have to encounter. He harbours still the tender feelings urged by his passion, and hastens to restore me to new life as soon as I perish. But what would with me those two shades I see advancing towards me through the doubtful light of these dark recesses?

SCENE II.——PSYCHE, CLEOMENES, AGENOR.

Psy. Cleomenes, Agenor, is it not you whom I see? Who has deprived you of life?

Psy

Cle. The meetest grief that could have caused a noble despair. That funeral pomp where you awaited the fiercest rigour and highest injustice of a fate most dark.

Cle

Age. On that same rock where heaven in its wrath was promising to you, instead of a husband, a dragon who would forthwith devour you, we held ourselves ready to repulse his fury, or die with you. You know it well, Princess; and when you disappeared from our gaze through the air, both, equally carried away by our love and grief, cast ourselves headlong from that rock, in order to follow your beauty, or rather to feel that love-born joy of offering in 

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