pleasure-seekers suddenly turned to stone;—splendid processions of maidens to the shrine of the Maiden-Goddess, and Bacchantes leading tame panthers in the escort of the Rosy God: all these and countless other visions of the dead Greek world still haunted me, as I laid aside the beautiful and quaint volume of archaeological learning that inspired them—bound in old fashion, and bearing the imprint of a firm that had ceased to exist ere the close of the French Revolution,—a Rococo Winkelmann. And still they circled about me, with the last smoke-wreaths of the last evening pipe, on the moonlight balcony, among the shadows.
*
* *
Then as I dreamed the beautiful dead world seemed to live again, in a luminous haze, in an Elysian glow. The processions of stone awoke from their sleep of two thousand years, and moved and chanted;—marble dreams became lithe flesh;—the phantom Arcadia was peopled with shapes of unclad beauty;—I saw eyelids as of Leucothea palpitating under the kisses of the Charities,—the incarnate
