ping forward to bestow a kiss. And a brazen tablet let into the black marble of the pedestal bore, in five learned tongues, the strange inscription:—
" Created by the hand of one maddened by love, I madden all who gaze upon me. Mortal, condemned to live in solitude with me, prepare thyself to die of love at my feet. The old gods, worshiped by youth and beauty, are dead; and no immortal power can place a living heart in this stony bosom or lend to these matchless limbs the warm flexibility and rosiness of life."
*
* *
Around the chamber of the statue ran a marble wainscoting chiseled with Bacchanal bas-reliefs—a revel of rude dryads and fauns linking themselves in amorous interlacings;—upon an altar of porphyry flickered the low flame of the holy fire fed with leaves of the myrtle sacred to love;—doves for the sacrifice were cooing and wooing in the marble court without;—a sound of crystal water came from a fountain near the threshold, where beautiful feminine monsters, whose lithe flanks blended into serpent coils,
