ed by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers:
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices--"E'en so, it is so!"

--
320 et seq.: see note to St. 37, 38, of `By the Fireside'.

A Death in the Desert.

{Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene:
It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth,
Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek
And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu:
Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, {5}
Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth,
Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi,
From Xanthus, my wife's uncle, now at peace:
Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name.
I may not write it, but I make a cross {10}
To show I wait His coming, with the rest,
And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.}

--
1-12. The bracketed prefatory lines, explanatory of the parchment
on which are recorded the last hours and last talk of St. John
with his devoted attendants, purport to have been written by one
who was at the time the owner of the parchment. It appears
to have come into his possession through his wife, a niece of
the Xanthus who, with Pamphylax of Antioch, the supposed author
of the narrative (he having told it on the eve of his martyrdom
to a certain Phoebas, v. 653), and two others, is represented therein
as waiting on the dying apostle, and who afterwards "escaped to Rome,
was burned, and could not write the chronicle." (vv. 56, 57.)

4. And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: the reference is
to some numbering on the parchment.

6. terebinth: the turpentine tree.
--

I said, "If one should wet his lips with wine,
And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
Or else the lappet of a linen robe, {15}
Into the water-vessel, lay it right,
And cool his forehead just above the eyes,
The while a brother, kneeling either side,
Should chafe each hand and try to make it warm,--
He is not so far gone but he might speak." {20}
This did not happen in the outer cave,
Nor in the secret chamber of the rock,
Where, sixty days since the decree was out,
We had him, bedded on a camel-skin,
And waited for his dying all the while; {25}
But in the midmost grotto: since noon's light
Reached there a little, and we would not lose
The la