How sweet it is, my Lisidis, when the last chiming of the midnight bell dies away in Arona’s towers — how sweet it is to share that bed, long solitary, where for a year I had but dreamed of you.
You are mine, Lisidis, and the evil genies whose tricks once prevented your Lorenzo from witnessing your graceful sleep, hold sway no more!
Rightly was it said, you may be sure, that those nocturnal terrors which assailed my soul during the hours intended for repose, were but a natural result of my assiduous study of the marvellous poetry of the ancients, and of the impression made upon me by certain fantastical fables of Apuleius, for his first book holds the imagination in a grip so fierce and painful that I could not wish, at the price of my eyes, that ever it should fall beneath your own.
Let no one speak to me of Apuleius and his visions any more; nor of the Latins nor the Greeks, nor of the bedazzling whimsies of their genius. Are you not, for me, a poetry lovelier than poetry itself, my Lisidis, richer in sweet enchantments than all nature?
But you sleep, child, and no longer hear me. At Isola Bella this night you danced too long at the ball. You danced too long, especially when you were not dancing with me, and now you are as weary as a rose shaken all night by the breeze, and which awaits the first light of morning on its half-bent stem to rise again, more blushing than before.
Then sleep beside me, your forehead against my arm, warming my breast with the scented softness of your breath. Sleep is stealing over me, too, but this time it falls upon my eyelids almost with the grace of one of your kisses. Sleep, Lisidis, sleep.
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There is a moment when the spirit, suspended in the emptiness of thought… Peace! Now night has covered the earth, no longer do you hear the footsteps of the returning townsman ringing on the cobbles or the clattering mules returning to their stalls. All you hear now is the wide soughing through the ill-fitting casement boards, and soon you feel that even this is but in your imagination. It becomes the voice of your soul, the echo of an idea, indefinable but fixed, which mingles with the first sensations of sleep. You are embarking upon that nocturnal life which unfolds (O miracle!) in worlds for ever new, amongst innumerable creatures whose forms the great Spirit has conceived but not deigned to create, and which he has merely scattered, mysterious and inconstant phantoms, throughout the boundless world of dreams. Bemused at evening’s stir, Sylphs descend around you, humming. Their mothwings beat against your drowsy eyes and you see the motley pollen they give off floating in the darkness like a little cloud of light in the midst of a fading sky. They throng, they embrace and mingle, eager to resume the magic converse of former nights, and to tell each other of unheard of events which nonetheless present themselves to your spirit in the form of a marvellous reminiscence. Gradually their voices die down, or reach you only through an unknown medium which transforms their tales into living pictures, and makes you an involuntary actor in the scenes they have prepared; for the imagination of the sleeper, in thrall to his independent and solitary soul, partakes in some sort of the perfection of the spirits. It soars with them and, borne miraculously aloft in the midst of the aerial choir of dreams, it flies from wonder to wonder until the moment when the song of a dawn bird alerts its venturesome escort to the return of light. Startled by the premonitory call, the sylphs gather like a swarm of bees at the first rumble of thunder, when great drops of rain bow the crowns of the swallow-skimmed flowers; they intermingle like atoms drawn by contrary forces, and vanish pell-mell into a ray of sunlight.