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A Christian boy must be the Icarus, and a Christian man the Scævola or the Hercules or the Orpheus of the amphitheatre; and Christian women, modest maidens, holy matrons, must be the Danaids or the Proserpine or worse, and play their parts as priestesses of Saturn and Ceres, and in blood-stained dramas of the dead.
This brilliant band began barking in the most insinuating tone on the appearance of the Queen; and Manto, who was almost as dexterous a linguist as Tiresias himself, informed her Majesty that these were the ladies of her bed-chamber; upon which Proserpine, who, it will be remembered had no passion for dogs, ordered them immediately out of her room. 'What a droll place! exclaimed the Queen.
'But how do you reconcile, inquired the ingenuous Proserpine, 'the success of Jupiter with the character which you ascribed last night to the spirit of the age?
The decorative framework represents a multitude of living creatures snails, snakes, lizards, mice, butterflies, and birds half hidden in foliage, together with the best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Diana and Actaeon, Europa and the Bull, the Labours of Hercules, &c.
I tell you he scuttled the Proserpine, and the great auger he did it with I have seen and handled.
Oh! not without Eurydice, said the Queen. 'Silence, Proserpine! said Pluto. 'May it please your Majesty, said Lachesis, 'I am doubtful whether we have the power of expelling anyone from Hades. It is not less the law that a mortal cannot remain here; and it is too notorious for me to mention the fact that none here have the power of inflicting death.
So leaning on Manto, and preceded by the ladies of her bed-chamber, whom, notwithstanding their repulse, she found in due attendance in the antechamber, Proserpine again continued her progress down the gallery, until they stopped at a door, which opening, she was ushered into the grand circular saloon, crowned by the dome, whose exterior the Queen had already observed.
The Egyptian Osiris, and the female pudenda, or symbol of the passive principle of generation were, in like manner, carried in procession to the temple of Libera or Proserpine.
And at all such times Proserpine comes back, as she may have cast wistful glances towards the vanishing home of her childhood, when the rude hands of the ravishers were bearing her away from the spot where she was gathering flowers in the vale of Enna; and we think of Orpheus taking that fatal, wistful last look back at Eurydice, with the thought in his eyes that could not give her up even for a moment, when emerging to the outer air from the flames and smoke of Tartarus.
This is from "The Garden of Proserpine": "From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free; We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."
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