When the arrangements were fully completed, a maiden herald pronounced in silvery tones, “Alheu!” Then Penny Song with tuneful rebeck essayed his overture with reverent eyes upturned in conceptive supplication to the ruling goddess of love and harmony. To the symphony of murmuring strings in soft prelude to a rippling vision from the fountain of musical poesy, he began his lay. Gradually, with the accession of tributary streams, the current tones increased from the smooth still voiced streamlet, until it merged into the rapid flow of the pebbly brook, combining in sound cascade variations with rippling flow over shallow inequalities into the bubbling depths of a pool, and from thence onward with accumulating force into the deep volume of the river’s tide. His voice in harmonious movement, tremulous with emotions reinvoked from passionate recitative thought, rehearsed in song the Songs of Solomon. Floating with the gilded wings of sensual taste, he fluttered over the luscious lisp of lips united in their sip of virgin nectar from the fount of instinctive love; at first chaste and free from guile in the sparkling depths of pure desire,—but, anon, overflowing in contemplation of the wide expanse of flowery meads, until satiated with its profligate deviation from the legitimate boundaries of its course, he discovers with lamentation the muddy defilement that exceeds his hopes of purification. The song of the bard was wildly descriptive of the longings of instinctive desire, until the hero had embraced with his wisdom the fairest and loveliest daughters of Israel; then imbecile with sensual gratification, he utters in his senility the wailing cry: “Vanity, all is vanity!” and is gathered to his father’s dust. The Princessa Idolisima, when the theme became expressive in sensual development, perused attentively the countenances of all within reach of her eyes, but seeing how eagerly engrossed they were with the voluptuous portrayals of the poet bard, she with her selected companions bowed their heads upon their hands with a sorrowful blush of shame. This mood the bard observing, with the cause, introduced into his lamentations strong reproof of himself for the selection of a subject so replete with infamous suggestion. His sarcasm eloquent in self-condemnation aroused the lascivious from their enraptured fancies, causing them, from shame, to break the spell; and when they saw the princessa and her maids with their heads bowed down, many from self-conviction gave evidence that within themselves they felt the cause. Among these was Count San Pietro Marceroni. The bard approved himself to be in the possession of extraordinary imitative powers, for in his recitative picture he held his hearers, of subject kind, entranced and as quickly aroused them with the pungency of his addenda to the dirged lamentations of instinctive wisdom, which would have startled the old hero to a more energetic renunciation of his follies than the vapid exclamation, that his