There shall your image stand, midst rosy bowers, Reviving through the ceaseless hours An altar built of living flowers. Near by, my simple monument Shall this short epitaph present: "Here Daphnis died of love. Stop, passenger, And say thou, with a falling tear, This youth here fell, unable to endure The ban of proud Alcimadure."' He would have added, but his heart Now felt the last, the fatal dart. Forth march'd the maid, in triumph deck'd, And of his murder little reck'd. In vain her steps her own attendants check'd, And plead That she, at least, should shed, Upon her lover dead, Some tears of due respect. The rosy god, of Cytherea born, She ever treated with the deepest scorn: Contemning him, his laws, and means of damage, She drew her train to dance around his image, When, woful to relate, The statue fell, and crush'd her with its weight! A voice forth issued from a cloud,-- And echo bore the words aloud Throughout the air wide spread,-- "Let all now love--the insensible is dead." Meanwhile, down to the Stygian tide The shade of Daphnis hied, And quaked and wonder'd there to meet The maid, a ghostess, at his feet. All Erebus awaken'd wide, To hear that beauteous homicide Beg pardon of the swain who died-- For being deaf to love confess'd, As was Ulysses to the prayer Of Ajax, begging him to spare, Or as was Dido's faithless guest.[44] [42] Theocritus, Idyl xxiii. [43] _Madame de la Mésangère._--This lady was the daughter of Madame de la Sablière.--Translator. She was the lady termed La Marquise with whom Fontenelle sustained his imaginary "conversation" in the "Plurality of Worlds," a book which became very popular both in France and England. [44] _Dido's faithless guest_.--Aeneas, with whom Dido, according to Virgil and Ovid, was in love, but who loved not, and sailed away. XXVII.--THE ARBITER, THE ALMONER, AND THE HERMIT.