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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Epicurean: A Tale," Thomas Moore weaves a rich narrative that explores the philosophical doctrines of Epicureanism through a tale set against the backdrop of ancient Greece. The novel is intricately structured, blending lyrical prose with vivid descriptions that invite readers into the sensory world of its characters while delving into profound existential themes. Moore's style is marked by a masterful interplay of dialogue and introspection, crafting segments that reflect the spiritual and emotional turmoil of characters grappling with pleasure, pain, and the pursuit of happiness. Situated within the broader Romantic literary movement, Moore's work is a potent reflection on the human experiences of desire and the complexities of life's pleasures, encouraging readers to ponder the weighty implications of living well. Thomas Moore, an Irish poet, songwriter, and a key figure of the Romantic era, is renowned for his contributions to literature and philosophy. His own experiences with loss, love, and societal expectations likely influenced his portrayal of the Epicurean philosophy, emphasizing the intrinsic connection between pleasure and virtue. Moore's background as both a poet and a political figure provided him with a unique lens through which to explore the tensions between individual desires and collective ethics in his narrative. Highly recommended for those interested in philosophical literature and historical narratives, "The Epicurean: A Tale" captivates with its eloquent prose and layered meanings. Readers will be drawn into a world where the pursuit of pleasure is not merely an indulgence but a profound search for understanding and fulfillment, making it a thought-provoking exploration of life's intricate tapestry. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Epicurean: A Tale
Table of Contents
Introduction
A disciple of pleasure confronts the unsettling possibility that true fulfillment lies beyond the senses. In Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean: A Tale, that tension animates a narrative set against the splendors and shadows of the ancient world. The book draws the reader into a landscape where ritual, philosophy, and longing intersect, presenting a seeker whose carefully cultivated doctrine begins to falter before mysteries he cannot dismiss. Rather than recounting battles or dynasties, the tale lingers over inner conflicts and the allure of hidden wisdom, inviting a reflective engagement with questions about how we know, what we love, and what we hope endures.
Written by the Irish poet and songwriter Thomas Moore and first published in 1827, the work belongs to the Romantic era’s tradition of imaginative prose romance. Although Moore was celebrated primarily for his lyric verse, this book demonstrates his interest in narrative fiction and antiquity. The setting is cast in ancient Egypt, evoked with atmospheric detail and a sense of the classical world’s meeting points with older rites and emergent beliefs. Readers encounter a historically inflected backdrop rather than strict historiography, as Moore shapes a literary canvas that favors mood and symbolism, characteristic of the period’s fascination with distant times and places.
The premise follows a devotee of Epicurean philosophy who leaves the familiar arguments of the schools to test their adequacy against the mysteries of life and death. Pursuit of clarity sends him into temples, deserts, and communities whose practices promise wisdom beyond syllogism, where doctrines of pleasure and tranquillity are weighed against claims of revelation. The journey operates both as travel and as a deepening trial of conviction. Without disclosing later turns, it is enough to note that the protagonist’s path keeps converging with people and rites that unsettle easy conclusions, creating a narrative propelled by inquiry rather than conquest or intrigue.
Moore’s style is richly descriptive and musical, drawing on his poetic background to shape scenes that feel ceremonial as much as narrative. The prose places a premium on visual and sensory atmosphere: processions, sacred spaces, and nocturnal vistas are rendered to suggest both grandeur and unease. Antiquarian references and classical allusions locate the tale within a learned frame, yet the book ultimately privileges feeling and impression over scholarly demonstration. The pacing favors contemplation, offering a reading experience that unfolds through tableaux, meditative digressions, and moments of sudden intensity, as if the landscape itself were a participant in the protagonist’s evolving understanding.
Themes of skepticism and faith, desire and renunciation, and mortality’s challenge to philosophy animate the book. The Epicurean tradition, with its pursuit of pleasure rightly understood, becomes a lens through which Moore probes whether reason and measured enjoyment can satisfy longings awakened by loss, fear, or wonder. The narrative also explores the costs and consolations of commitment, as rites, communities, and ideals demand allegiance that may unsettle prior identities. Throughout, the text invites readers to consider how beliefs are tested—not only by argument, but by encounters with beauty, suffering, and the promise of meaning that exceeds what the senses alone can certify.
For contemporary readers, the book’s questions remain resonant: What grounds a life well lived? How do we weigh the claims of empirical insight against experiences that feel irreducibly spiritual or moral? The tale’s ancient setting creates a safe distance for examining present-day debates about materialism, fulfillment, and the search for significance. At the same time, its Romantic-era sensibility prompts reflection on how nineteenth-century literature envisioned antiquity and the sacred. Approaching the novel today can spark both empathetic engagement with its seeker’s uncertainties and critical awareness of the era’s aesthetic habits, making the text a conduit for dialogue between past and present.
Readers who enjoy reflective historical romances and philosophically tinged quests will find a distinctive mood here: meditative, ornate, and quietly suspenseful. The emphasis lies less on plot pyrotechnics than on inner pressure, vivid setting, and the gradual revaluation of inherited ideas. Within Moore’s broader career, the book complements his poetic gifts by casting lyric instincts into narrative form, yielding a tale that feels at once imaginative and intellectually curious. It offers the pleasure of immersion in a carefully staged world and the challenge of grappling with enduring dilemmas—the alluring promise that literature can illuminate not just where we travel, but what we hope to find.
Synopsis
The book opens with a framing narrator who reports finding a Greek manuscript in a monastery on the Nile. The document presents the personal account of Alciphron, an Athenian associated with the Epicurean school, and is offered with minimal editorial intrusion. This device situates the tale as a recovered voice from late antiquity, inviting readers to weigh its testimony. The frame then yields to Alciphron’s first person narrative. From the outset, the story signals a passage across terrains of belief, with Egypt’s temples, libraries, and deserts, as well as the discreet gatherings of an emerging faith, providing the setting for an inward and outward quest.
In Athens, Alciphron holds a respected position among Epicureans, committed to a philosophy that values measured pleasure, clarity of mind, and freedom from fear. A troubling vision unsettles his composure, suggesting a path toward knowledge of the soul’s endurance. An oracle directs him to Egypt, where the sacred fire of a temple will convey a sign. Despite the paradox of seeking immortality within a creed that doubts it, he resolves to test the command. He prepares to leave the security of familiar doctrines, drawn by the promise of certainty that his elegant skepticism has not supplied.
Sailing east, Alciphron enters the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria, a city where Greek learning, Egyptian ritual, and diverse communities meet. He observes the mingling of commerce and scholarship before traveling up the Nile to Memphis, a center of ancient worship. There he is welcomed by priests who recognize the terms of his oracle and promise initiation into mysteries. The grandeur of processions, inscriptions, and sacred animals impresses him, even as he seeks something more than spectacle. The temple’s hidden chambers and rites are presented as pathways to ultimate knowledge, but the conditions of entry and the guarded tone arouse a cautious curiosity.
His initiation proceeds through nocturnal ceremonies, incense filled halls, and symbolic tests beneath the temple. At a crucial moment, the altar’s flame droops in a pattern that echoes his prophecy. Among the officiants is a veiled priestess whose presence arrests him, later named Alethe. Promises of disclosure mingle with suggestion and delay, and Alciphron senses the mechanisms of priestly control. A disturbance interrupts the sequence, exposing uncertain authority within the shrine. In the confusion, chance encounters and private guidance turn him away from the temple’s path, setting him on a different search that leads beyond official rituals toward more concealed assemblies.
Alethe, outwardly a servant of Isis, proves inwardly connected to a community that gathers apart from the public cults. She introduces Alciphron to meetings marked by hymns, shared meals, and care for the poor, centered on a single God and hope beyond death. The simplicity of their rites contrasts with the grandeur of the temples. Alciphron listens to elders explain their beliefs and witnesses the steadiness of adherents facing risk. Without embracing their creed, he measures their claims against his training, noting how their language of love, sacrifice, and resurrection addresses concerns that his philosophical circle tends to set aside.
Tension in the cities increases as rival beliefs contend for influence. Priests seek to reclaim a wayward votary, and officials guard public order, while informers track unfamiliar faces. Alciphron’s association with Alethe draws scrutiny from both the temple and the authorities. Their movements take them along canals and gardens, through necropolises and workshops, aided by friends and hermits who sympathize with the new community. Pursuit and concealment force rapid choices, revealing the practical costs of affiliations. Alciphron must negotiate his reputation in Athens, the obligations incurred by entering mysteries, and the loyalty he feels to the guide who has altered his course.
In the desert, they encounter ascetics whose withdrawn lives exemplify a different estimate of pleasure and pain. A learned anchorite discusses the soul’s nature, the limits of sense based contentment, and a future life that invests present action with meaning. The austere landscape, the Nile’s rhythms, and the night sky frame these exchanges, countering the spectacle of urban rites with a quieter grandeur. Alciphron revisits his principles, testing refined doubt against the lived evidence of courage and charity he has observed. He finds the personal dimension of love entwined with doctrinal questions, tightening the bond between his inward debate and outward commitments.
External pressures return as their refuge is discovered and official notice converges. Public ceremonies swell in the city, where processions and proclamations stage competing visions of authority and truth. A moment arrives when indirect inquiry must yield to public stance. In scenes of assembly and command, witnesses act under threat, and the drama of conviction becomes visible. Alciphron is pressed to choose a path that cannot be postponed. The story’s themes unify here: the allure of cultured ease, the authority of tradition, the claims of civic peace, and the promise of spiritual hope, all bearing on a single, costly decision.
The conclusion resolves the quest for immortality in keeping with the narrative’s development, while avoiding sensational detail. The manuscript closes with meditations on the price of truth and the insufficiency of pleasure when confronted with suffering and obligation. The framing voice briefly returns, reminding readers that this is a testimony carried across time from Egypt’s ruins to modern hands. The book’s overall message emphasizes passage from speculative comfort to purposeful conviction, showing how affection and revelation redirect a life founded on elegant skepticism. Without disclosing final outcomes, the tale affirms that belief and love reshape the seeker more deeply than ceremony or argument alone.
Historical Context
The Epicurean: A Tale is set in the later Roman imperial period, principally in Roman Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Its narrator, an Athenian seeker, moves from late antique Athens to Alexandria, Memphis, and the Nitrian Desert, tracing a world where Greek urban culture, Egyptian priestly traditions, and imperial administration intersect. The timeframe evoked is roughly the late third to early fourth century CE, when pagan cults still operated beside expanding Christian communities. Alexandria, the empire’s second city, controlled Nile trade and grain shipments to Rome, while deserts west of the Delta harbored ascetic settlements. This geography frames a narrative about spiritual quest amid imperial power and religious change.
Between 235 and 284, the Roman Empire endured the Crisis of the Third Century: rapid imperial successions, civil wars, frontier invasions, plague, and currency collapse. Egypt, a critical grain province since Augustus annexed it in 30 BCE, experienced heavy taxation, military garrisons, and sporadic unrest, including the Palmyrene takeover under Queen Zenobia in 270–272. Diocletian’s accession in 284 and the Tetrarchy (formalized in 293) reorganized provinces, strengthened frontier defense, and standardized taxation with the capitatio-iugatio. In the novel, the atmosphere of administrative scrutiny and the sense of a world under strain provide the backdrop for a private religious odyssey, casting the protagonist’s search for certainty against a state seeking order.
Religious policy hardened under Diocletian with the Great Persecution of Christians (303–311). Four imperial edicts ordered destruction of churches and scriptures, loss of civil rights, imprisonment of clergy, and compulsory sacrifice to the gods. In 311, Galerius issued an Edict of Toleration; in 313, Constantine and Licinius promulgated the Edict of Milan, granting religious liberty and restoring confiscated property. Egypt saw martyrs recorded in Alexandria and the Fayyum, and the circulation of Acts of the Martyrs shaped piety. The Epicurean repeatedly evokes clandestine assemblies, catacomb-like refuges, and the charisma of confessors, aligning the hero’s contact with hidden Christian communities with the lived reality of persecution and the precarious shift toward toleration.
Egyptian monasticism emerged in the late third and early fourth centuries as a distinctive social phenomenon. Antony of Egypt (c. 251–356) withdrew to the Eastern Desert; Athanasius’s Life of Antony publicized anchoritism across the empire. In the Delta’s western reaches, Amoun founded Nitria c. 330; Macarius established Scetis (Wadi al-Natrun) soon after; the Kellia began c. 338 as a vast semi-eremitic settlement. Pachomius (c. 292–348) organized cenobitic communities at Tabennesi on the Upper Nile, introducing rules, work schedules, and spiritual discipline. The novel’s passages amid desert caves, fasting holy men, and austere liturgies mirror this monastic landscape, using the Desert Fathers’ renunciatory ethos as a counterpoint to Epicurean ease and as the testing ground for conversion, sacrifice, and visions.
Alexandria’s religious pluralism centered on powerful pagan institutions, notably the Serapeum, a temple complex with a famed library annex, and pervasive Isis and Serapis cults. Imperial decrees under Theodosius I in 391–392 banned pagan sacrifices and closed temples; Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria led actions that culminated in the destruction of the Serapeum in 391. These acts dramatized the transfer of urban authority from priesthoods to bishops and magistrates. The Epicurean stages processions, mysteries, and conflicts around temples and shrines, and its imagined initiations recall the magnetism of Isis and Serapis rites even as the narrative bends toward Christianity. By setting encounters in Alexandria’s streets and precincts, the tale registers the violent unmaking of a classical civic religion.
Doctrinal and political struggles within Christianity reshaped Egypt in the fourth century. The Arian controversy, focused on the nature of Christ, erupted after Arius of Alexandria was condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, which affirmed the Son as consubstantial with the Father. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (c. 328–373), was exiled multiple times (335, 339, 356, 362) as imperial factions shifted. These disputes mobilized urban crowds, monks, and officials, entangling theology with imperial law. While The Epicurean does not parse doctrine, its depiction of fervent, disciplined Egyptian Christians, wary of authorities yet emboldened by martyr ideals, reflects a society where belief had public consequences and where ascetics and bishops competed to define authentic holiness and authority.
Composed in 1827, the book also mirrors contemporary historical currents. Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition (1798–1801) and the seizure of the Rosetta Stone (1799; British Museum, 1802) sparked European Egyptology; Champollion’s 1822 decipherment and the multi-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809–1829) fed educated readers’ appetite for antiquity. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) galvanized philhellenism; Thomas Moore’s friend Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824. In Ireland and Britain, agitation led by Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association (founded 1823) culminated in the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The Epicurean taps Egyptomania’s imagery, aligns its Athenian hero with Greek liberty as a moral ideal, and refracts Moore’s Irish Catholic commitments by dramatizing persecution, toleration, and conscience against authoritarian religious apparatuses.
As social and political critique, the narrative exposes the costs of sacral power allied with the state: coerced sacrifices, surveillance of conscience, and ritual authority used to police dissent. By opposing wealthy temple establishments and urbane philosophers to impoverished, hunted believers and desert ascetics, it illuminates classed access to knowledge, security, and law in late Roman cities. The persecution episodes indict legal regimes that criminalize belief, inviting comparison with contemporary disabilities faced by religious minorities in Moore’s Britain and Ireland. The conversion arc valorizes free assent, charity, and cross-cultural sympathy, implicitly condemning triumphalist violence in both pagan and Christian guises and urging toleration as the only durable ground for civic peace.
The Epicurean: A Tale
TOLORD JOHN RUSSELLTHIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED BY ONE WHO ADMIRES HIS CHARACTER AND TALENTS, AND IS PROUD OF HIS FRIENDSHIP.
ALETTER TO THE TRANSLATOR,
In a visit I lately paid to the monastery of St. Macarius,—which is situated, as you know, in the Valley of the Lakes of Natron,—I was lucky enough to obtain possession of a curious Greek manuscript, which, in the hope that you may be induced to translate it, I herewith send you. Observing one of the monks very busily occupied in tearing up, into a variety of fantastic shapes, some papers [pg vi]which had the appearance of being the leaves of old books, I enquired of him the meaning of his task, and received the following explanation:—
The Arabs, it seems, who are as fond of pigeons as the ancient Egyptians, have a superstitious notion that, if they place in their pigeon-houses small scraps of paper, written over with learned characters, the birds are always sure to thrive the better for the charm; and the monks, who are never slow in profiting by superstition, have, at all times, a supply of such amulets for purchasers.
In general, the holy fathers have been in the habit of scribbling these mystic fragments, themselves; but a discovery, which they have lately made, saves them this trouble. Having dug up (as my informant stated) a chest of old manuscripts, which, being chiefly on the subject of alchemy, must have been buried in the time of Dioclesian, “we thought we could not,” added the monk, “employ such [pg vii]rubbish more properly, than in tearing it up, as you see, for the pigeon-houses of the Arabs.”
On my expressing a wish to rescue some part of these treasures from the fate to which his indolent fraternity had consigned them, he produced the manuscript which I have now the pleasure of sending you,—the only one, he said, remaining entire,—and I very readily paid him the price he demanded for it.
You will find the story, I think, not altogether uninteresting; and the coincidence, in many respects, of the curious details in Chap. VI. with the description of the same ceremonies in the Romance of Sethos1, will, I have no doubt, strike [pg viii]you. Hoping that you may be tempted to give a translation of this Tale to the world,
THE EPICUREAN.
CHAPTER I.
It was in the fourth year of the reign of the late Emperor Valerian[1], that the followers of Epicurus[2], who were at that time numerous in Athens, proceeded to the election of a person to fill the vacant chair of their sect;—and, by the unanimous voice of the School, I was the individual chosen for their Chief. I was just then entering on my twenty-fourth year, and no instance had ever before occurred, of a person so young being selected for that office. Youth, however, and the personal advantages that adorn it, were not, it may be supposed, among the least valid recommendations, to a sect that included within its circle all the beauty as well as wit of Athens, and which, though dignifying its [pg 2]pursuits with the name of philosophy, was little else than a pretext for the more refined cultivation of pleasure.
The character of the sect had, indeed, much changed, since the time of its wise and virtuous founder, who, while he asserted that Pleasure is the only Good, inculcated also that Good is the only source of Pleasure.[1q] The purer part of this doctrine had long evaporated, and the temperate Epicurus would have as little recognised his own sect in the assemblage of refined voluptuaries who now usurped its name, as he would have known his own quiet Garden in the luxurious groves and bowers among which the meetings of the School were now held.
Many causes, besides the attractiveness of its doctrines, concurred, at this period, to render our school the most popular of any that still survived the glory of Greece. It may generally be observed, that the prevalence, in one half of a community, of very rigid notions on the subject of religion, [pg 3]produces the opposite extreme of laxity and infidelity in the other; and this kind of re-action it was that now mainly contributed to render the doctrines of the Garden the most fashionable philosophy of the day. The rapid progress of the Christian faith had alarmed all those, who, either from piety or worldliness, were interested in the continuance of the old established creed—all who believed in the Deities of Olympus, and all who lived by them. The consequence was, a considerable increase of zeal and activity, throughout the constituted authorities and priesthood of the whole Heathen world. What was wanting in sincerity of belief was made up in rigour;—the weakest parts of the Mythology were those, of course, most angrily defended, and any reflections, tending to bring Saturn, or his wife Ops, into contempt, were punished with the utmost severity of the law.
In this state of affairs, between the alarmed bigotry of the declining Faith, [pg 4]and the simple, sublime austerity of her rival, it was not wonderful that those lovers of ease and pleasure, who had no interest, reversionary or otherwise, in the old religion, and were too indolent to enquire into the sanctions of the new, should take refuge from the severities of both under the shelter of a luxurious philosophy, which, leaving to others the task of disputing about the future, centered all its wisdom in the full enjoyment of the present.
The sectaries of the Garden had, ever since the death of their founder, been accustomed to dedicate to his memory the twentieth day of every month. To these monthly rites had, for some time, been added a grand annual Festival, in commemoration of his birth. The feasts, given on this occasion by my predecessors in the Chair, had been invariably distinguished for their taste and splendour; and it was my ambition, not merely to imitate this example, but even to render the anniversary, now celebrated under my auspices, [pg 5]so brilliant, as to efface the recollection of all that went before it.
Seldom, indeed, had Athens witnessed such a scene. The grounds that formed the original site of the Garden had, from time to time, received considerable additions; and the whole extent was laid out with that perfect taste, which knows how to wed Nature to Art, without sacrificing her simplicity to the alliance. Walks, leading through wildernesses of shade and fragrance—glades, opening, as if to afford a play-ground for the sunshine—temples, rising on the very spots where imagination herself would have called them up, and fountains and lakes, in alternate motion and repose, either wantonly courting the verdure, or calmly sleeping in its embrace,—such was the variety of feature that diversified these fair gardens; and, animated as they were on this occasion, by all the living wit and loveliness of Athens, it afforded a scene such as my own youthful fancy, rich as it was then in [pg 6]images of luxury and beauty, could hardly have anticipated.
The ceremonies of the day began with the very dawn, when, according to the form of simpler and better times, those among the disciples who had apartments within the Garden, bore the image of our Founder in procession from chamber to chamber, chanting verses in praise of—what had long ceased to be objects of our imitation—his frugality and temperance.
Round a beautiful lake, in the centre of the garden, stood four white Doric temples, in one of which was collected a library containing all the flowers of Grecian literature; while, in the remaining three, Conversation, the Song, and the Dance, held, uninterrupted by each other, their respective rites. In the Library stood busts of all the most illustrious Epicureans, both of Rome and Greece—Horace, Atticus, Pliny the elder, the poet Lucretius, Lucian, and the biographer of the Philosophers, lately lost to us, Dio[pg 7]genes Laertius. There were also the portraits, in marble, of all the eminent female votaries of the school—Leontium and her fair daughter Danae, Themista, Philænis, and others.
It was here that, in my capacity of Heresiarch, on the morning of the Festival, I received the felicitations of the day from some of the fairest lips of Athens; and, in pronouncing the customary oration to the memory of our Master (in which it was usual to dwell on the doctrines he inculcated) endeavoured to attain that art, so useful before such an audience, of diffusing over the gravest subjects a charm, which secures them listeners even among the simplest and most volatile.
Though study, as may easily be supposed, engrossed but little of the mornings of the Garden, yet the lighter part of learning,—that portion of its attic honey, for which the bee is not obliged to go very deep into the flower—was zealously cultivated. Even here, however, the student [pg 8]had to encounter distractions, which are, of all others, least favourable to composure of thought; and, with more than one of my fair disciples, there used to occur such scenes as the following, which a poet of the Garden, taking his picture from the life, described:—
But it was for the evening of that day, that the richest of our luxuries were reserved. Every part of the Garden was illuminated, with the most skilful variety of lustre; while over the Lake of the Temples were scattered wreaths of flowers, through which boats, filled with beautiful children, floated, as through a liquid parterre.
Between two of these boats a perpetual combat was maintained;—their respective [pg 9]commanders, two blooming youths, being habited to represent Eros and Anteros; the former, the Celestial Love of the Platonists, and the latter, that more earthly spirit, which usurps the name of Love among the Epicureans. Throughout the evening their conflict was carried on with various success; the timid distance at which Eros kept from his more lively antagonist being his only safeguard against those darts of fire, with showers of which the other continually assailed him, but which, luckily falling short of their mark upon the lake, only scorched the flowers upon which they fell, and were extinguished.
In another part of the gardens, on a wide verdant glade, lighted only by the moon, an imitation of the torch-race of the Panathenæa was performed, by young boys chosen for their fleetness, and arrayed with wings, like Cupids; while, not far off, a group of seven nymphs, with each a star on her forehead, represented the movements of the planetary choir, and embodied the [pg 10]dream of Pythagoras into real motion and song.
At every turning some new enchantment broke upon the ear or eye. Sometimes, from the depth of a grove, from which a fountain at the same time issued, there came a strain of music, which, mingling with the murmur of the water, seemed like the voice of the spirit that presided over its flow;—while sometimes the strain rose breathing from among flowers; and, again, would appear to come suddenly from under ground, as if the foot had just touched some spring that set it in motion.
