It Encourages
Poetry, Idleness, Delicious Sensual Reverie.
O Jones!
Friend of my
heart! would you not like to be a white-robed Greek, lolling
languidly, on the cool benches here, and pouring compliments (in
the Ionic dialect) into the rosy ears of Neaera? Instead of Jones,
your name should be Ionides; instead of a silk hat, you should wear
a chaplet of roses in your hair: you would not listen to the
choruses they were singing on the stage, for the voice of the fair
one would be whispering a rendezvous for the mesonuktiais horais,
and my Ionides would have no ear for aught beside. Yonder, in the
mountain, they would carve a Doric cave temple, to receive your urn
when all was done; and you would be accompanied thither by a dirge
of the surviving Ionidae. The caves of the dead are empty now,
however, and their place knows them not any more among the festal
haunts of the living. But, by way of supplying the choric melodies
sung here in old time, one of our companions mounted on the scene
and spouted,
"My name is Norval."
On the same day we lay to for a while at another ruined theatre,
that of Antiphilos. The Oxford men, fresh with recollections of
the little-go, bounded away up the hill on which it lies to the
ruin, measured the steps of the theatre, and calculated the width
of the scene; while others, less active, watched them with
telescopes from the ship's sides, as they plunged in and out of the
stones and hollows.
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