United States or Burkina Faso ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Take me to OEnone, the nymph of Mount Ida!" Then his friends laid Paris on a litter, and bore him up the steep path to Mount Ida. Often had he climbed it swiftly, when he was young, and went to see the nymph who loved him; but for many a day he had not trod the path where he was now carried in great pain and fear, for the poison turned his blood to fire.
The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political to aid some Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in OEnone and Mariana in the South. In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father.
Day after day he sat with her in the shadow of her woodland home, and talked of innocence and beauty, and of a life of sweet contentment, and of love; and the maiden listened to him with wide-open eyes and a heart full of trustfulness and faith. "By and by, Paris and Oenone were wedded; and their little cottage in the mountain glen was the fairest and happiest spot in Ilios.
On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking for the beautiful Paris. Later art represents him as a bowman of girlish charms, wearing a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend that he had a son, Corythus, by OEnone, and that he killed the lad in a moment of jealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise him.
"Now, when the servants came to Mount Ida, they chose a bull for which Paris had long cared, and which he loved more than any other. He protested and would not let the beast be driven from the pasture until it was agreed that he might go to the city with it and contend in the games for the prize. But Oenone, the river nymph, wept and prayed him not to go.
OEnone, remembering the wrongs she had suffered, refused to heal the wound, and Paris went back to Troy and died. There was in Troy a celebrated statue of Minerva called the Palladium. It was said to have fallen from heaven, and the belief was that the city could not be taken so long as this statue remained within it.
Destiny saved and nurtured him to fulfill that prophecy. He grew up as a shepherd and tended his flocks on the mountain, but his beauty held the favor of all the wood-folk there and won the heart of the nymph Oenone. To him, at last, the three goddesses intrusted the judgment and the golden apple.
"My own OENONE, Beautiful-browed OENONE, my own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingraven 'For the most fair, would seem award it thine As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace Of movement, and the charm of married brows." "'Dear Mother Ida, hearken ere I die.
As the showers descend from heaven to return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving observation of Nature, and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on both sides. When he was young, and when "Oenone" was first published, he almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas, which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there.
But now I beseech you in the name of the Gods, and for the memory of our love, that you will have pity on me and heal my hurt, and not refuse your grace and let me die here at your feet." Then OEnone answered scornfully: "Why have you come here to me? Surely for years you have not come this way, where the path was once worn with your feet.
Word Of The Day