Thus spoke Earth, and overcome with heat and thirst, could say no more. Then Jupiter omnipotent, calling to witness all the gods, including him who had lent the chariot, and showing them that all was lost unless speedy remedy were applied, mounted the lofty tower from whence he diffuses clouds over the earth, and hurls the forked lightnings. But at that time not a cloud was to be found to interpose for a screen to earth, nor was a shower remaining unexhausted. He thundered, and brandishing a lightning bolt in his right hand launched it against the charioteer, and struck him at the same moment from his seat and from existence! Phaëton, with his hair on fire, fell headlong, like a shooting star which marks the heavens with its brightness as it falls, and Eridanus, the great river, received him and cooled his burning frame. The Italian Naiads reared a tomb for him, and inscribed these words upon the stone:
“Driver of Phœbus’ chariot. Phaëton, Struck by Jove’s thunder, rests beneath this stone. He could not rule his father’s car of fire, Yet was it much so nobly to aspire.”[10]
His sisters, the Heliades, as they lamented his fate, were turned into poplar trees, on the banks of the river, and their tears, which continued to flow, became amber as they dropped into the stream.
Milman, in his poem of “Samor,” makes the following allusion to Phaëton’s story:
“As when the palsied universe aghast Lay . . . mute and still, When drove, so poets sing, the Sun-born youth Devious through Heaven’s affrighted signs his sire’s Ill-granted chariot. Him the Thunderer hurled From th’ empyrean headlong to the gulf Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep Even now the sister trees their amber tears O’er Phaëton untimely dead.”
In the beautiful lines of Walter Savage Landor, descriptive of the Sea-shell, there is an allusion to the Sun’s palace and chariot. The water-nymph says:
“. . . I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and things that lustre have imbibed In the sun’s palace porch, where when unyoked His chariot wheel stands midway on the wave. Shake one and it awakens; then apply Its polished lip to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.” —_Gebir_, Book I.