Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/33

22 flowing none knew whither, but telling to all who chose to hear of the dead days when their song had mingled with the vine-feast chants to Bacchus, and had borne their cadence in companionship with the thoughts of Virgil or of Martial. No heat could reach, no season parch, those subterranean waters that here and there welled up to síght, rushing brown and bright under the moon, but soon were lost again in the recesses of the earth, and only traced by the rich herbage that grew wherever they wound, or—when the stillness was intense as Alpine solitudes—by the murmuring hollow ripple that told where they threaded their way through secret channels to the sea. Here the sun-rays could not touch to burn the grasses black; here the twisted leafage was fresh and dew-laden as though a northern coolness fanned them; here the silvery arum uncurled above the screened channels of the brooks; here the white hellebore thrust its delicate head through mosses green and curling as though, they grew under English elm-woods. And here in the deep loneliness, sunk over their hocks in the water-fed reeds and grasses, the worn-out horses slackened speed and strained to reach a freshet that brimmed and bubbled under an aisle of