THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS. "If equal honours by the partial skies Are doom'd both heroes, (Juno thus replies,) If Thetis' son must no distinction know, Then hear, ye gods! the patron of the bow. But Hector only boasts a mortal claim, His birth deriving from a mortal dame: Achilles, of your own ethereal race, Springs from a goddess by a man's embrace (A goddess by ourself to Peleus given, A man divine, and chosen friend of heaven) To grace those nuptials, from the bright abode Yourselves were present; where this minstrel-god, Well pleased to share the feast, amid the quire Stood proud to hymn, and tune his youthful lyre." Then thus the Thunderer checks the imperial dame: "Let not thy wrath the court of heaven inflame; Their merits, nor their honours, are the same. But mine, and every god's peculiar grace Hector deserves, of all the Trojan race: Still on our shrines his grateful offerings lay, (The only honours men to gods can pay,) Nor ever from our smoking altar ceased The pure libation, and the holy feast: Howe'er by stealth to snatch the corse away, We will not: Thetis guards it night and day. But haste, and summon to our courts above The azure queen; let her persuasion move Her furious son from Priam to receive The proffer'd ransom, and the corse to leave." He added not: and Iris from the skies, Swift as a whirlwind, on the message flies, Meteorous the face of ocean sweeps, Refulgent gliding o'er the sable deeps. Between where Samos wide his forests spreads, And rocky Imbrus lifts its pointed heads, Down plunged the maid; (the parted waves resound;) She plunged and instant shot the dark profound. As bearing death in the fallacious bait, From the bent angle sinks the leaden weight; So pass'd the goddess through the closing wave, Where Thetis sorrow'd in her secret cave: There placed amidst her melancholy train (The blue-hair'd sisters of the sacred main) Pensive she