Almighty God, how fallible and vain
Is human judgment, dimmed by clouds obscure!
Stanza xv. lines 1 and 2.
Proh Superi, quantum mortalia pectora cæcæ
Noctis habent!
Ovid Met.
Behind the land was left; and there to pine
Olympia, who yet slept the woods among.
Stanza xx. lines 1 and 2.
In this part of the story, made up of Perseus and Andromeda, and Ariadne and Theseus, we more immediately recognise the abandonment of Ariadne, which besides the main incident of the tale, has, as we shall see, furnished Ariosto with many of his details.
Till from her gilded wheels the frosty rhine
Aurora upon earth beneath had flung;
And the old woe, beside the tumbling brine,
Lamenting, halcyons mournful descant sung.
Stanza xx. lines 3, 4, 5, 6.
Tempus erat, vitreâ quo primum terra pruinâ
Spargitur, et tectæ fronde queruntur aves.
Ariadne Theseo.
Here Ariosto has, I think, improved Ovid’s description, by turning the woodland-birds into halcyons, whose appearance and plaintive cries seem to harmonize more happily with the scene.
The ‘old woe,’ lamented by them, was the catastrophe which
