the East.  The couches, to which this table was the centre, were covered with tapestries of azure and gold; and from invisible tubes the vaulted roof descended showers of fragrant waters, that cooled the delicious air, and contended with the lamps, as if the spirits of wave and fire disputed which element could furnish forth the most delicious odorous.  And now, from behind the snowy draperies, trooped such forms as Adonis beheld when he lay on the lap of Venus.  They came, some with garlands, others with lyres; they surrounded the youth, they led his steps to the banquet.  They flung the chaplets round him in rosy chains.  The earth—­the thought of earth, vanished from his soul.  He imagined himself in a dream, and suppressed his breath lest he should wake too soon; the senses, to which he had never yielded as yet, beat in his burning pulse, and confused his dizzy and reeling sight.  And while thus amazed and lost, once again, but in brisk and Bacchic measures, rose the magic strain: 

Anacreontic

In the veins of the calix foams and glows
The blood of the mantling vine,
But oh! in the bowl of Youth there glows
A Lesbian, more divine! 
Bright, bright,
As the liquid light,
Its waves through thine eyelids shine!

Fill up, fill up, to the sparkling brim,
The juice of the young Lyaeus;
The grape is the key that we owe to him
From the gaol of the world to free us. 
Drink, drink! 
What need to shrink,
When the lambs alone can see us?

Drink, drink, as I quaff from thine eyes
The wine of a softer tree;
Give the smiles to the god of the grape—­thy sighs,
Beloved one, give to me. 
Turn, turn,
My glances burn,
And thirst for a look from thee! 
As the song ended, a group of three maidens, entwined with a chain of starred flowers, and who, while they imitated, might have shamed the Graces, advanced towards him in the gliding measures of the Ionian dance:  such as the Nereids wreathed in moonlight on the yellow sands of the AEgean wave—­such as Cytherea taught her handmaids in the marriage-feast of Psyche and her son.

Now approaching, they wreathed their chaplet round his head; now kneeling, the youngest of the three proffered him the bowl, from which the wine of Lesbos foamed and sparkled.  The youth resisted no more, he grasped the intoxicating cup, the blood mantled fiercely through his veins.  He sank upon the breast of the nymph who sat beside him, and turning with swimming eyes to seek for Arbaces, whom he had lost in the whirl of his emotions, he beheld him seated beneath a canopy at the upper end of the table, and gazing upon him with a smile that encouraged him to pleasure.  He beheld him, but not as he had hitherto seen, with dark and sable garments, with a brooding and solemn brow:  a robe that dazzled the sight, so studded was its whitest surface with gold and gems, blazed upon his majestic form; white roses, alternated with the emerald and the ruby, and shaped tiara-like, crowned his raven locks.  He appeared, like Ulysses, to have gained the glory of a second youth—­his features seemed to have exchanged thought for beauty, and he towered amidst the loveliness that surrounded him, in all the beaming and relaxing benignity of the Olympian god.