Dance, the skies are violet; Dance, our lips with wine are wet; Sing, heigh-ho, the shade is mellow! Twist and twine from dusk till dawn; Feet and hoofs beat bare the lawn. Bacchus is a noble fellow! From our garlands grapes are flung, And we tread them in the grass; Ivy, in our tresses strung, Streams behind us as we pass. Dance, the skies are violet; Dance, our lips with foam are wet; Sing, the beechen shade is mellow! Bend and bound with one accord; Foot it firm, and trench the sward. Bacchus is a splendid fellow! Round we spin; our starry eyes Glimmer through our tossing manes. Time is ending; wisdom dies; We are drunk; and Bacchus reigns. Dance, the skies are violet; The dust with juice of grapes is wet; Sing, the deepening shade is mellow! Dance the night into the day; Dance into eternity. Bacchus is the only fellow! Harlequin. Now, you may tell them; now, that they think of Bacchus but as one of themselves--a wine-bibber, and the inventor of wine-bibbing. Silenus. Do you disparage wine-bibbing? Harlequin. May my mask grow to my face, and my sword to my arm, if I do not think it a most intellectual pursuit! Columbine. For what do you take us? Silenus. No enigmas: I am not good at riddles in the evening; for the tedious parched hours of this torrid July, and the labour of moistening them make me sweat brains; but if I have not enough left to say what I take you for I would be glad to mount spontaneously to heaven in a chariot of fire--I mean by combustion. You, my good Harlequin, I take to be the son of Mercury and one of the furies. Harlequin. Which one? Silenus. Know you not your own mother? She whom Hermes mistook for Aphrodite: it's an old story now, as your joints might tell you, for you are a most degenerate Harlequin. Now do I remember Bathylus and Pylades, sweet youths both. Harlequin. Were they Harlequins? Silenus. Harlequins! They were anything. Their very hands were garrulous as beldames, and their fingers more exclamatory than Marsyas under the knife of Apollo. You are a mere grasshopper and a magpie--a very signboard. You are like your father in nothing but the lightness of your heels, and the nimbleness of your pilfering. Harlequin. In what am I like my mother? Silenus. In greed, and in that you are appointed to be my torment. But you serve me, too, or I would discard you. Moreover, you amuse me. You are a walking firmament: your spangles are the milky way, and your belt the zodiac. Sometimes you are Orion, and swagger out with sword on thigh to ogle the Pleiades. You are the bad angel of pleasantry, because you are, as it were, humour run to seed, and become a science: you are a mere