I have learnt your wily secret:
I will use it, I shall keep it!
Cunning spider, cease your spinning!
My web boasts the best beginning.
Yours is wan and pale and ashen:
After no such lifeless fashion
Mine is woven. Golden sunbeams
Prisoned in its meshes, light gleams
From its shadowest recesses.
Tell me, spider, made you ever
Web so strong no knife could sever
Woven of a maiden's tresses?"

On the other side of the viny curtain, Anthrops discovered the entrance
to a large cavern hollowed out in a rock. The cavern was carpeted with
the softest moss of the most variegated shades, ranging from faintest
green to a rich golden brown. The rocky walls were of considerable
height, and curved gracefully around the ample space,--a woodland
apartment. But the most remarkable feature in the grotto was a
rose-colored cloud, that seemed to have been imprisoned in the farther
end, and, in its futile efforts to escape, shifted perpetually into
strange, fantastic figures. Now, the massive form of the Israelitish
giant appeared lying at the feet of the Philistine damsel; anon, the
kingly shoulders of the swift-footed Achilles towered helplessly above
the heads of the island girls. The noble head of Marcus Antoninus bowed
in disgraceful homage before his wife; the gaunt figure of the stern
Florentine trembled at the footsteps of the light Beatrice; the sister
of Honorius, from the throne of half the world, saluted the sister
of Theodosius, grasping the sceptre of the other half in her slender
fingers. Every instance of weak compliance with the whims, of devoted