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146 memory, and from those brief words to build a world. His imagination had never awakened before, but now his fancies thronged with dreams, wild as a youth's, vague as a poet's, and dazzling as

{{c|{{smaller|Fireflies tangled in a silver braid.}} Thus, before him, in the Danobian solitudes, once the battle-field of nations, the Persian of the Immortal Guard had thought of some gazelle«eyed Lydian, seen once, never to be forgot, in the Temple of the Sun; the wild Bulgarian had felt his savage eyes grow dim with tears of blood when the Byzantine arrow pierced his breast, and he remembered some Greek captive, loved as tigers love, who never again would lie within his arms, and to whose feet he would never bring again the pillage of the palace and the trophies of the hunt; the Roman Legionary leaning on his spear, on guard, while the cohorts adept in their black frozen camp, had dreamed of a gold-haired barbarian far away in the utmost limits of the western isles, whom he had loved under the green shadows of fresh Britannic woods, as he had never loved the haughty Roman matron who bore his name where tawny Tiber rolled. Thus, before him, men had mused, in those forsaken {{hws|soli|solitudes}}