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What fortune matches the degree
Of Hector's own Andromache?
Still wear you Pyrrhus' nuptial yoke?'
She dropped her voice, and softly spoke
With lowly downcast eyes:
'O happy more than all beside,
The Priameian maid,
Who for her dead foe's pleasure died
Beneath her city's shade,
Not drawn for servitude, nor led
A captive to a conqueror's bed,
While we, our country laid in dust,
To exile dragged o'er many a wave,
Have stooped to Pyrrhus' haughty lust,
His infant's mother and his slave!
A Spartan marriage tempts the youth:
He plights Hermione his truth;
Cast off, to Helenus I fall,
So wills our master, thrall to thrall.
But soon Orestes, mad with crime,
And wroth to lose his promised bride,
Smote Pyrrhus in unguarded time,
And at the altar-fire he died.
On Helenus, the tyrant slain,
Devolves a portion of his reign:
Who calls the realm beneath his hand
From Chaon's name Chaonian land,
And crowns the hill, in sign of power,
With Pergamus, our Dardan tower.
But you—what destiny from heaven,
What stress of wind your bark has driven
Unknowing on our coast?
And lives he yet, whom once at Troy—
Ascanius? dwells there in the boy
Grief for his mother lost?