Hark! The nymph Egeria is singing beside her fountain; the nightingale warbles in the vine of the Hypogeum of the Scipios; the languid Syrian breeze indolently wafts to us the fragrance of the wild tuberoses. The palm-tree of the abandoned villa waves half-drowned in the amethyst and azure of the Phosbean light. But thou, made pale by the reflections of Diana's purity, thou, O Cynthia, art a thousand times more graceful than that palm-tree. The shades of Delia, Lalage, Lydia, Lesbia, resting on broken cornices, stammer mysterious words around thee. Thy glances cross those of the stars and mingle with their rays. [Sidenote: To Cynthia.] But, Cynthia, nothing is real except the happiness which thou canst enjoy. Those constellations which shine so brightly on thy head harmonize with thy bliss only through the illusions of a beguiling perspective. O young and fair Italian, time is ending! On those flowery carpets thy companions have already passed. A mist unfolds itself, rises and veils the eye of the night with a silvery retina; the pelican cries and returns to the strand; the woodcock alights in the horse-tails of the diamond-studded springs; the bell resounds under the dome of St. Peter's; the nocturnal plain-chant, the voice of the middle-ages, saddens the lonely monastery of Santa-Croce; the monk chants Lauds upon his knees, on the calcined columns of San Paolo; vestals prostrate themselves on the icy slab that closes their crypts; the _pifferaro_ pipes his midnight lament before the solitary Madonna, at the condemned gate of a catacomb. 'Tis the hour of melancholy; religion awakens and love falls asleep! Cynthia, thy voice is weakening: the refrain which the Neapolitan fisherman taught thee in his swift-sailing bark, or the Venetian oarsman in his gondola, dies away on thy lips. Yield to the exhaustion of thy sleep; I will watch over thy repose. The darkness with which thy lids cover thy eyes vies in suavity with that which drowsy, perfumed Italy pours over thy brow. When the neighing of our horses is heard in the Campagna, when the morning-star proclaims the dawn, the herd of Frascati will come down with his goats and I shall not cease to soothe thee with my whispered lullaby: "A bundle of jasmin and narcissus, an alabaster Hebe but lately emerging from the hollow way of an excavation, or fallen from the frontal of a temple, lies on this bed of anemones: no, Muse, you err. The jasmin, the alabaster Hebe is a Roman sorceress, born sixteen months ago of May and the half of a spring, to the sound of the lyre, at the rise of dawn, in a field of roses of Pæstum.