The old and universal fairy-tales of the invisible husband, the cruel sisters, and the impossible quests are here woven together and brought into connexion with the Olympic pantheon, and through all runs a slight thread, only here and there visible, of allegory. But if Psyche is at times the soul, and if the daughter she bears to Cupid is Pleasure, the fairy-tale triumphs gloriously over the allegory, and remains the most wonderful thing of the kind in Latin. Here, and in the _Golden Ass_ in general, the extraordinarily embroidered language of Apuleius is far more in keeping than in his philosophic writings. His hundreds of diminutives and neologisms, his antitheses, alliterations, assonances, figures and tropes, his brilliant invention, his fun and humour, here have full scope and add pleasure to every fresh episode of the fairy-tale and of the larger and more miscellaneous tale of adventure in which it is set--in the strangest setting conceivable. Cupid and Psyche is his own addition to the story of the Ass--quite irrelevant, and like many other irrelevant things in books an immense enrichment. Another development of the original story which is similarly due to Apuleius alone is the climax in the last book. The ass, in the Greek story, becomes a man by eating roses. In the Latin, Lucius, weary of the life of an ass, finds himself by moonlight on the seashore near Corinth, and amid "the silent {235} secrets of opaque night," he reflects that "the supreme goddess rules in transcendent majesty and governs human affairs by her providence." So he addresses a rather too eloquent prayer to the Queen of Heaven under her various possible names, Ceres, Venus, Diana and Proserpine. He then falls asleep, and at once "lo! from mid sea, uplifting a countenance venerable even to gods, emerges a divine form. Gradually the vision, gleaming all over, and shaking off the sea, seemed to stand before me." A crown of flowers rests on her flowing hair. Glittering stars, the moon, flowers and fruits, are wrought into her raiment, which shimmers white and yellow and red as the light falls upon it. In one hand is a sistrum, in the other a golden vessel shaped like a boat, with an asp for its handle.[94] She speaks. [Sidenote: Isis]