494She said, 'Who has ruined both wretched me and you, Orpheus, what madness so great? 495Look, once again the cruel Fates call me back, and sleep closes my swimming eyes. 497And now farewell: I am borne away, wrapped in vast night, and stretching out to you helpless hands, alas, yours no longer!' 499she spoke, and suddenly fled from his sight in another direction, like smoke mingled with thin air, and saw him no more, as he clutched in vain at shadows and longed to say much, nor did the ferryman of Orcus let him cross the barrier of the marsh again. 504What was he to do? 504Where was he to go, his wife twice taken from him?
505With what weeping could he move the shades, with what voice the powers? 506She indeed, already cold, was floating in the Stygian boat. 507They say that for seven whole months on end, beneath a lofty cliff by the waters of lonely Strymon, he wept, and in icy caves unfolded this tale, soothing tigers and leading oaks with his song; 511as the nightingale, mourning beneath the shade of a poplar, laments her lost young, which a hard-hearted ploughman, watching, has dragged unfledged from the nest; 513but she weeps through the night, and, sitting on a branch, renews her pitiful song and fills the places far and wide with her sad complaints.
516No love, no marriage-songs swayed his heart. 517Alone he roamed the Hyperborean ice and the snowy Tanais and the fields never free of Rhipaean frosts, lamenting Eurydice snatched away and the empty gifts of Dis; 520spurned by this devotion, the Ciconian mothers, amid the rites of the gods and the orgies of nocturnal Bacchus, tore the young man apart and scattered him over the broad fields. 523Even then, when Oeagrian Hebrus carried his head, torn from his marble neck, and rolled it in mid-stream, "Eurydice!" the voice itself and the cold tongue, "ah, poor Eurydice!" 526called with ebbing breath; "Eurydice" the banks echoed along the whole river.'