mours in silent secrecy. "Thus as the moon Endymion lay with her, So did Hippolytus and Verbio." But there is an exquisitely subtle, delicately strange idea or ideal in the conception of the apparently chaste "clear, cold moon" casting her living light by stealth into the hidden recesses of darknessand acting in the occult mysteries of love or dreams. So it struck BYRON as an original thought that the sun does not shine on half the forbidden deeds which the moon witnesses, and this is emphasized in the Italian witch-poem. In it the moon is distinctly invoked as the protectress of a strange and secret amour, and as the deity to be especially invoked for such love-making. The one invoking says that the window is opened, that the moon may shine splendidly on the bed, even as our love is bright and beautiful...and I pray her to give great rapture to us. The quivering, mysteriously beautiful light of the moon, which seemsto cast a spirit of intelligence or emotion over silent Nature, and dimly "The sun set and uprose the yellow moon: The devil's in the moon for mischief; they Who called her chaste, methinks, began too soon Their nomenclature; there is not a day The longest, not the twenty-first of June, Sees half the business in a wicked way On which three single hours of moonshine smile." --Don Juan, cxiiihalf awaken it - raising shadows into thoughts and causing every tree androck to assume the semblance of a living form, but one which, whileshimmering and breathing, still sleeps in a dream - could not escape the Greeks, and they expressed it as Diana embracing Endymion. But as nightis the time sacred to secrecy, and as the true Diana of the Mysteries was the Queen of Night, who wore the crescent moon, and mistress ofall hidden things, including "sweet secret sins and loved iniqui...
