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Updated: June 8, 2025
The shepherd Aristaeus, who first taught the management of bees, was the son of the water-nymph Cyrene. His bees had perished, and he resorted for aid to his mother. He stood at the river side and thus addressed her: "Oh, mother, the pride of my life is taken from me! I have lost my precious bees.
"I know you think I'm always up to mischief, and I don't suppose I'll ever learn to be a lady and know how not to break things, and I'm so sorry, but I didn't suppose there was any harm in jumping off an apple-tree, and the water-nymph went over and perhaps if you sent me to school or something I'd learn better where they tie you down to a great board," said Gypsy, talking very fast, and quite forgetting her punctuation.
I am a water-nymph, said the lady, the spirit of the stream from which you drank yesterday. You saw me then for the first time, but I have often seen you in the forest and I have long loved you. The knight was more than ever enchanted by this naive confession, and begged that their wedding should not be long delayed.
Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of the fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed; that her holy fire, tended by chaste virgins, burned perpetually in a round temple within the precinct; that associated with her was a water-nymph Egeria who discharged one of Diana's own functions by succouring women in travail, and who was popularly supposed to have mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who was to her what Adonis was to Venus, or Attis to Cybele; and, lastly, that this mythical Virbius was represented in historical times by a line of priests known as Kings of the Wood, who regularly perished by the swords of their successors, and whose lives were in a manner bound up with a certain tree in the grove, because so long as that tree was uninjured they were safe from attack.
"Beware, my friend, of crystal brook Or fountain, lest that hideous hook, Thy nose, thou chance to see; Narcissus' fate would then be thine, And self-detested thou would'st pine, As self-enamoured he." Clytie was a water-nymph and in love with Apollo, who made her no return. So she pined away, sitting all day long upon the cold ground, with her unbound tresses streaming over her shoulders.
The water-nymph says: "I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and things that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace porch, where when unyoked His chariot wheel stands midway on the wave. Shake one and it awakens; then apply Its polished lip to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."
It was a pretty thing a water-nymph rising from an unfolded lily, with both hands parting her long hair from a wondering face, that, pleased with its own beauty, was bent to watch its reflection in the water. Altogether, the spot was so bewitching, that it is little wonder Gypsy's work kept dropping into her lap, and her eyes wandering away somewhere into dreamland.
"If another gale should spring up, I really do not think the craft would keep afloat an hour," exclaimed Adair, with a ruthful countenance, after he had been pumping away for an hour, till he was, as he said, like Niobe, all tears, or a water-nymph. "Then we must let her sink," answered Alick, calmly.
Or was she a water-nymph within the fountain, or fairy or woodland goddess peeping over my shoulder, or the ghost of some forsaken maid who had drowned herself for love? Or, in good truth, had a lovely girl with a warm heart and lips that would bear pressure stolen softly behind me and thrown her image into the spring? I watched and waited, but no vision came again.
It was no doubt from some such incident that the superstition arose that the bees were engendered by the decaying flesh of the animal; and Virgil, in the following story, shows how this supposed fact may be turned to account for renewing the swarm when it has been lost by disease or accident: Aristaeus, who first taught the management of bees, was the son of the water-nymph Cyrene.
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