No More Learning

And thou wilt come to the Hybristes river, not ill named,
Which pass not, for not easy is 't to pass,
Before you get to Caucasus itself, highest
Of mountains, where the stream spurts out its tide
From the very temples; and passing over
The star-neighbored summits, 't is necessary to go
The southern way, where thou wilt come to the man-hating
Army of the Amazons, who Themiscyra one day
Will inhabit, by the Thermedon, where's
Salmydessia, rough jaw of the sea,
Inhospitable to sailors, stepmother of ships;
They will conduct thee on thy way, and very cheerfully.
And to the Cimmerian isthmus thou wilt come,
Just on the narrow portals of a lake, which leaving
It behooves thee with stout heart to pass the Moeotic straits;
And there will be to mortals ever a great fame
Of thy passage, and Bosphorus from thy name
'T will be called. And leaving Europe's plain
The continent of Asia thou wilt reach. --Seemeth to thee,
forsooth,
The tyrant of the gods in everything to be
Thus violent? For he a god, with this mortal
Wishing to unite, drove her to these wanderings.
A bitter wooer didst thou find, O virgin,
For thy marriage. For the words you now have heard
Think not yet to be the prelude.

_Io. _ Ah! me! me! alas! alas!

_Pr. _ Again dost shriek and heave a sigh?
What
Wilt thou do when the remaining ills thou learn'st?

_Ch. _ And hast thou any further suffering to tell her?

_Pr. _ Ay, a tempestuous sea of baleful woe.

_Io. _ What profit, then, for me to live, and not in haste
To cast myself from this rough rock,
That rushing down upon the plain I may be released
From every trouble? For better once for all to die,
Than all my days to suffer evilly.

_Pr. _ Unhappily my trials would'st thou hear,
To whom to die has not been fated;
For this would be release from sufferings;
But now there is no end of ills lying
Before me, until Zeus falls from sovereignty.

_Io. _ And is Zeus ever to fall from power?

_Pr. _ Thou would'st be pleased, I think, to see this accident.

_Io. _ How should I not, who suffer ill from Zeus?