stream:  the loving-kindness that was between thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men’s mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the young.”  Hill and fountain and pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, as once about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in of the spring, contending for the prize of the kisses—­“Whoso most sweetly touches lip to lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother.  Happy is he who judges those kisses of the children.”  Lost over the bright furrows of the sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as Moschus beheld her—­“With one hand she clasped the beast’s great horn, and with the other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet in the hoar sea’s infinite spray”; and from the border-land of mythic story, that was then this world’s horizon, yet more faintly the fading voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles.  Faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, vaguely I hear them; at last there remains only “the hoar sea’s infinite spray.”  And will you say it was in truth all a dream?  Were the poor fisherman in their toil alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a local habitation and a name?  It was Virgil’s dream and Spenser’s; and some secret there was—­something still in our breasts—­that made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened with sweet thoughts.

And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore.  She, too, in her centuries has had her poet.  Perhaps none who will see these words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus.  Few of his works remain, and little is known of his life.  He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey.  He wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the Latin epic poets.  He wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which Seneca quotes, saying of him, “No one out of so many talented men deplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus.”  Some dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him.  These fragments may not he easily obtained.  But take down your Virgil; and, if it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the “Georgics,” called “Etna.”  This is the work of Cornelius Severus.  An early death took from him the perfection of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion.