tood motionless: I feared my breath might shake the
water over. I looked her in the face for her commands ... and to see
it ... to see it so calm, so beneficent, so beautiful. I was
forgetting what I had prayed for, when she lowered her head, tasted of
the cup, and gave it me. I drank; and suddenly sprang forth before me
many groves and palaces and gardens, and their statues and their
avenues, and their labyrinths of alaternus and bay, and alcoves of
citron, and watchful loopholes in the retirements of impenetrable
pomegranate. Farther off, just below where the fountain slipped away
from its marble hall and guardian gods, arose, from their beds of moss
and drosera and darkest grass, the sisterhood of oleanders, fond of
tantalizing with their bosomed flowers and their moist and pouting
blossoms the little shy rivulet, and of covering its face with all the
colours of the dawn. My dream expanded and moved forward. I trod again
the dust of Posilipo, soft as the feathers in the wings of Sleep. I
emerged on Baia; I crossed her innumerable arches; I loitered in the
breezy sunshine of her mole; I trusted the faithful seclusion of her
caverns, the keepers of so many secrets; and I reposed on the buoyancy
of her tepid sea. Then Naples, and her theatres and her churches, and
grottoes and dells and forts and promontories, rushed forward in
confusion, now among soft whispers, now among sweetest sounds, and
subsided, and sank, and disappeared. Yet a memory seemed to come fresh
from every one: each had time enough for its tale, for its pleasure,
for its reflection, for its pang. As I mounted with silent steps the
narrow staircase of the old palace, how distinctly did I feel against
the palm of my hand the coldness of that smooth stone-work, and the
greater of the cramps of iron in it!

'Ah me! is this forgetting?' cried I anxiously to Fiametta.

'We must recall these scenes before us,' she replied: 'such is the
punishment of them. Let us hope and believe that the apparition, and
the compunction which must follow it, will be accepted as the full
penalty, and that both will pass away almost together.'

I feared to lose anything attendant on her presence: I feared to
approach her forehead with my lips: I feared to touch the lily on its
long wavy leaf in her hair, which filled my whole heart with
fragrance. Venerating, adoring, I bowed my head at last to kiss her
snow-white robe, and trembled at my presumption. And yet the
effulgence o