"'T was in the flowery season of the year, When fair Europa's ravisher disguised, (A crescent moon, the arms upon his brow, And strewed with sunbeams all his glitt'ring skin), Shines out the glowing honour of the sky, And the stars pastures in the azure fields, When he who well the cup of Jove might fill Mure gracefully than Ida's shepherd boy, Was wrecked--and scorned as well as far away, The tears of love and amorous complaints Gave to the sea, which he then pitying Imparts to rustling leaves, that to the wind Repeats the saddest sighs, Soft as Arion's softest instrument-- And from the mountain top a pine which aye Struggled with its fierce enemy the North, There rent a pitying limb--and the brief plank Became a no small dolphin to the youth Who wand'ring heedlessly, was forced t'intrust His way unto a Libyan waste of sea, And his existence to an ocean-skiff, At first sucked in, and afterwards thrown forth, Where not far off a rock there stood, whose top Was crowned with bulrushes, and feathers warm With seaweed dank and foam besprent all o'er, And rest and safety found there where a nest The bird of Jove had built. He kissed the sands, and of the broken skiff, The portion that was thrown upon the beach He gave the rock--and let the rugged cliffs Behold his loveliness, for naked stood The youth.--The ocean first had drunk, and then Restored his vestments to the yellow sands, And in the sunshine he extended them, And the sun licking them with his sweet tongue Of tempered fire, slowly invests them round, And sucks the moisture from the smallest thread."[113] Sismondi only gives half this sentence, but the latter part is the most intelligible; and besides it was difficult to refrain from presenting the reader with the refined image (_culta figura_) of the manner in which the shipwrecked boy's clothes were dried. In a hurried translation of this sort, the harmony of verse is not preserved; and that, it must be remarked, is great, and one of Gongora's chief beauties. There is, indeed, a sort of dusky gorgeousness throughout; but it makes the reader smile, to be told that this style of poetry was new and unknown, and "superior to aught that man ever before imagined or composed:" that it was to supersede Garcilaso, Herrera, and Gongora himself in his better days. Such was the faith of the _cultoristos_, such their hope in the _estilo culto._