the Spirits, and the Echoes), and Asia, picturing it, concludes:—
Yet 'tis a thing of air,
For through its grey robe gleams the golden dew
Whose stars the noon has quenched not.
The Echoes also which come after the Dream with the same summons, "Follow! Follow!" sing of "the noon-tide darkness deep" of the caverns, and "the woodland noontide dew"; and Asia and Panthea "follow ere the voices fade away." Yet at the end of scene ii., when they have thus passed into the forest, the second Faun says,
But should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn,
leaving us still in the forenoon.
Still Act II.: sc. iii., we are again in dawn, with the mist breaking,
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sun-like radiance fling
The dawn.
The opening words, "Hither the sound has borne us," as well as the second chant of semichorus i. in the preceding scene, suggest a rapture-swift journey, although the last song of the Echoes in sc. i. enumerates immense tracts to be traversed; but, as we can scarcely be still in the dawning of the first day, we must, it appears, conceive that Asia and Panthea have been borne on the "plume-uplifting wind" and the billows of the "storm of sound,"
By the forests, lakes, and fountains,
Through the many-folded mountains;
To the rents, and gulphs, and chasms,
