Haste thee, nymph, whose well-aimed spear

Wounds the fleeting mountain-deer!

Dian, Jove's immortal child,

Huntress of the savage wild!

Goddess with the sun-bright hair!

Listen to a people's prayer.

Turn, to Lethe's river turn,

There thy vanquished people mourn![2]

Come to Lethe's wavy shore,

Tell them they shall mourn no more.

Thine their hearts, their altars thine;

Must they, Dian—must they pine?

[1] This hymn to Diana is extant in Hephaestion. There is an anecdote of our poet, which has led some to doubt whether he ever wrote any odes of this kind. It is related by the Scholiast upon Pindar (Isthmionic. od. ii. v. 1. as cited by Barnes) that Anaecreon being asked why he addressed all his hymns to women, and none to the deities? answered, "Because women are my deities."

I have assumed, it will be seen, in reporting this anecdote, the same liberty which I have thought it right to take in translating some of the odes; and it were to be wished that these little infidelities were always allowable in interpreting the writings of the ancients.

[2] Lethe, a river of Iona, according to Strabo, falling into the Meander. In its neighborhood was the city called Magnesia, in favor of whose inhabitants our poet is supposed to have addressed this supplication to Diana. It was written (as Madame Dacier conjectures) on the occasion of some battle, in which the Magnesians had been defeated.