On death; the means thereto must I devise myself.ChorusHush!PhaedraDo thou at least advise me well. For this very day shall I gladden Cypris, my destroyer, by yielding up my life, and shall own myself vanquished by cruel love. Yet shall my dying be another’s curse, that he may learn not to exult at my misfortunes; but when he comes to share the self-same plague with me, he will take a lesson in wisdom.

ChorusO to be nestling ’neath some pathless cavern, there by god’s creating hand to grow into a bird amid the winged tribes! Away would I soar to Adrians wave-beat shore and to the waters of Eridanus; where a father’s hapless daughtersThe daughters of Helios and Clymene are represented as weeping for Phaethon their brother on the banks of Eridanus (Po). Ovid Metam. v. 340 sqq. says the sun turned their tears into amber, and they themselves became poplars on the river-bank. in their grief for Phaethon distil into the glooming flood the amber brilliance of their tears.

ChorusAnd to the apple-bearing strand of those minstrels in the west I then would come, where ocean’s lord no more to sailors grants a passage o’er the deep dark main, finding there the heaven’s holy bound, upheld by Atlas, where water from ambrosial founts wells up beside the couch of Zeus inside his halls, and holy earth, the bounteous mother, causes joy to spring in heavenly breasts.

ChorusO white-winged bark, that o’er the booming ocean-wave didst bring