The exquisite silence was evidently waiting for the exquisite voice, that presently not so much broke as mingled with it, like a swan swimming through a lake.
"Whom seek you ?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right at my shoulder.

But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though a mystical strain of music had passed through the wood.
"Whom seek you ?" and again the lovely speech flowered upon the silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded pool.
"The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and looking half sideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at whose foot I lay had opened its rocky side, and in the cleft, like a long lily-bud sliding from its green sheath, stood a dryad, and my speech failed and my breath went as I looked upon her beauty, for which mortality has no simile.

Yet was there something about her of the earth-sweetness that clings even to the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth-born thing.

She was not all immortal, as man is not all mortal.

She was the sweetness of the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its green leaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars kissing its green leaves in the still Trophonian nights.
"The maid you seek," said she, and again she broke the silence like the moon breaking through the clouds, "what manner of maid is she?
For a maid abides in this wood, maybe it is she whom you seek.