A Book of Myths

Instead of swans, there followed Larguen a very old woman, white-haired and feeble, and three very old men, bony and wrinkled and grey. And when Larguen beheld them, terror came...

For days and nights the mother and child were tossed on the billows, but yet no harm came near them, and one morning the chest grounded on the rocky beach of Seriphos, an island...

"Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water; Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose; While murmuring mournfully, Lîr's lonely daughter Tells to the night-star her tale of wo...

"Shameless one!" they cried; "and does our father's daughter confess to a thing so unutterable! Only by slaying the monster canst thou hope to regain thy place amongst the daugh...

Thus did he take off his helmet and cuirass, and stood unclothed beside the youths of Larissa, and so godlike was he that they all said, amazed, "Surely this stranger comes from...

At these words there was great rejoicing amongst the lords of the Red Branch and all those who listened, and Conor, glad at heart, said, "My three best champions shall go to bri...

Upon the earth, and on the children of men who were as gods in their knowledge and mastery of the force of fire, Jupiter had had his revenge. For Prometheus he reserved another...

"Oh, thou whose soul is the soul of the untilled ground!" he said, "wouldst thou place thy music, that is like the wind in the reeds, beside my music, which is as the music of t...

"Sunflowers" is the name by which we know those flamboyant blossoms which somehow fail so wholly to suggest the story of Clytie, the nymph whose destruction came from a faithful...

But the Danish knights, careless in the knowledge that the Grendel must even now be in his dying agonies, and that once more Hereot was for them a safe and noble sleeping-place,...

As he sat one day near a river in the stillness of the forest, there came from afar an ugly clamour of sound. It struck against the music of Orpheus' lute and slew it, as the co...

Yet are there times, as we look at the squat, bronze bodies of the frogs--green-bronze, dark brown spotted, and all flecked with gold, the turned-down corners of their wistful m...

By day, while the sun-god drove his chariot in the high heavens and turned the blue-green Ægean Sea into the semblance of a blazing shield of brass, Idas and Marpessa sat togeth...

"A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers. The blood brings forth the roses, the tears, the wind-flower."

"Come then! if Baldur was so dear beloved, And this is true, and such a loss is Heaven's-- Hear, how to Heaven may Baldur be restored. Show me through all the world the signs of...

Early in the morning Charlemagne heard mass, and then, on his golden throne under the great pine, he sat and took counsel with his Douzeperes. Not one of them trusted Marsile, b...

Near St. Goar, there rises out of the waters of the Rhine a perpendicular rock, some four hundred feet high. Many a boatman in bygone days there met his death, and the echo whic...

The voice was that of Aristæus, calling aloud for his mother. Then his mother gave command, and the waters of the river rolled asunder and let Aristæus pass down far below to wh...

Bitter was the mourning of Clymene over her beautiful only son, and so ceaselessly did his three sisters, the Heliades, weep for their brother, that the gods turned them into po...

Upon it, first of all, Jason cast his spear. But the sharp point only touched it, and unwounded, the boar rushed on, its gross, bristly head down, to disembowel, if it could, th...

Just as a little child holds out its hands to catch the sunbeams, to feel and to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so, down through the ages, men have stretche...

Minor typographical errors (omitted punctuation, omitted or transposed letters, etc.) have been amended without note. Inconsistent hyphenation and accent use has been made consi...