Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Last Days of Pompeii

BOOK THE FOURTH 3. Chapter III (continued)

     Wild rings the trump o'er ranks to glory marching;
        Music's sublimer bursts for war are meet;
      But sweet lips murmuring under wreaths o'er-arching,
        Find the low whispers like their own most sweet.
           Steal, my lull'd music, steal
             Like womans's half-heard tone,
           So that whoe'er shall hear, shall think to feel
             In thee the voice of lips that love his own.

At the end of that song Ione's cheek blushed more deeply than before, and Glaucus had contrived, under cover of the table, to steal her hand.

'It is a pretty song,' said Fulvius, patronizingly.

'Ah! if you would oblige us!' murmured the wife of Pansa.

'Do you wish Fulvius to sing?' asked the king of the feast, who had just called on the assembly to drink the health of the Roman senator, a cup to each letter of his name.

'Can you ask?' said the matron, with a complimentary glance at the poet.

Sallust snapped his fingers, and whispering the slave who came to learn his orders, the latter disappeared, and returned in a few moments with a small harp in one hand, and a branch of myrtle in the other. The slave approached the poet, and with a low reverence presented to him the harp.

'Alas! I cannot play,' said the poet.

'Then you must sing to the myrtle. It is a Greek fashion: Diomed loves the Greeks--I love the Greeks--you love the Greeks--we all love the Greeks--and between you and me this is not the only thing we have stolen from them. However, I introduce this custom--I, the king: sing, subject, sing!' The poet, with a bashful smile, took the myrtle in his hands, and after a short prelude sang as follows, in a pleasant and well-tuned voice:--

           THE CORONATION OF THE LOVES

                    I