Will never harden; nor let a twelve-month child.
Let no man wash in water that's defiled
By women washing in it. Bitter price
You pay for that in time. Burnt sacrifice
Mock not, lest Heaven be angry ... So do you
That men talk not against you. Talk's a brew
Mischievous, heady, easy raised, whose sting
Is ill to bear, and not by physicking
Voided. Talk never dies once set a-working--
Indeed, in talk a kind of god is lurking.

I regret to record the manner of death of the mainly pleasant old
country poet, still more the supposed cause of it--but it may not
be true. The Oracle at Delphi, which it seems he consulted after his
triumph at Chalkis, warned him that he would come by his end in the
grove of Nemean Zeus. He took pains, therefore, to avoid Nemea in his
travels, and chose to stay for a while at OEnoë in Lokris, "where,"
says Mr. Evelyn-White, his editor in the _Loeb Library_, "he was
entertained by Amphiphanes and Ganyktor, sons of Phegeus." But you
never knew when the Oracle would have you, or where. OEnoë was also
sacred to Nemean Zeus, "and the poet, suspected by his hosts of having
seduced their sister, was murdered there. His body, cast into the sea,
was brought to shore by dolphins, and buried at OEnoë; at a later
date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for
the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these
poets--I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take
it, it sounded to Alkæus of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon his
dust:

When, in the Lokrian grove dead Hesiod lay,