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She sat down by me as I lay, and began to read from Tennyson's Lotus-Eaters. But it was not reading it was rather a soft dreamy chant, which rose and fell like the waves of sound on an AEolian harp.
As the schoolboys know, when Ulysses set sail from Troy for home, adverse winds wafted him to the coast of Africa and he beat around in the adjacent seas and visited islands and spent a considerable time meeting many kinds of curious and weird adventures, dallying at one time with the lotus-eaters, at another braving the Cyclops, the one-eyed monsters, until he arrived at Ithaca where "he bent his bow and slew the suitors of Penelope, his harassed wife."
"And, whatever their object, are they not essentially immoral?" said Lothair. "I have more faith in ideas than in persons," said the lady. "When a truth is uttered, it will, sooner or later, be recognized. It is only an affair of time. It is better that it should mature and naturally germinate than be forced." "You would reduce us to lotus-eaters," exclaimed the professor.
Barlow felt that he must talk to the girl; his senses were rampant; he was sitting like the lotus-eaters drinking in a deadly intoxication. But it was Bootea who broke the silence as though she, too, felt herself slipping.
This, then, we cannot but think, distinguishes the literary period of Shelley from our own. It distinguishes even the unquestionable treasures and masterpieces of to-day from similar treasures and masterpieces of the precedent day; even the Lotus-Eaters from Kubla-Khan; even Rossetti's ballads from Christabel.
He says, whisperingly, while his face is illumined with happiness. "A few days, beloved, and then we shall lead, till I weary my wife with the intensity of my love, the life of the lotus-eaters."
The momentary shade was an intense relief, for we had been in the unmitigated glare of the sun the whole morning. Of course we quickly had out our cigar-cases, and puffing the grateful weed, we were soon in full enjoyment of dignified ease. We were in that idle mood when, one says with the lotus-eaters, "taking no care" "There is no joy but calm!
to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of Art" the "clear-walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," the "full- fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in Ida"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin": At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?
And others say that they went southward, into the Red Indian Sea, and past the sunny lands where spices grow, round Æthiopia toward the west; and that at last they came to Libya, and dragged their ship across the burning sands, and over the hills into the Syrtes, where the flats and quicksands spread for many a mile, between rich Cyrene and the Lotus-eaters' shore.
Cecily shook her head; Italy she loved, and she had seen nothing of it north of Naples, but it was the land of lotus-eaters. They would go there again, but not until life had seriously shaped itself. Whilst they talked and dreamed, decision came to them in the shape of Mrs. Lessingham. Without warning, she one day presented herself at their lodgings, having come direct from Paris.
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