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.